By MAIA de LA BAUME

LIMOGES, France - While the French may be renowned for their refined culinary tastes, they have another side. It was on full display this autumn in this city in central France known for its expensive porcelain but with another side of its own.

Limoges is also a city of butchers, and their annual festival, La Frairie des Petits Ventres, or The Brotherhood of Small Bellies, is a celebration of what Christine Travers delicately terms “products that we could never find in supermarkets.” The festival, held on the third Friday of October, was created with the idea of building interest in the meat products consumed by peasants in much older days. One local favorite is the Amourettes ? literally, “the fling” - a dish of sheep testicles cooked in garlic, parsley and port.

Mrs. Travers had just finished a blood sausage sandwich and a piece of chestnut pie, and after washing it down with some cider, confided a closely held secret: it is the sheep testicles that draw her most of all.

“It melts in your mouth, and tastes like lamb sweetbread,” she said, as she made her way though a crowd of ecstatic seekers after delicacies prepared from tripe, lamb testicles, and the organs of lamb, veal and pigs. The one-day festival starts in the morning with an open-air market, and closes in the evening with a religious procession.

It is the excellence of the tripe that attracts hundreds of food lovers to the narrow Rue de la Boucherie, or butcher’s street, a picturesque medieval lane lined with half-timbered houses. Lured by the powerful smell of grilled pig, visitors strolled along the butchers’ stalls in search of “grillons,” grilled pig fat, or an “andouillette” sandwich made of a cooked sausage with veal or pork intestines and onions.

In the street, butchers fried the offerings in deep, heavy pans, often under the visitors’ expectant gaze; many, like Francois Brun, proudly showed off their original tripe-based creations. Mr. Brun’s “nez d’amour,” or “nose of love,” is an elaborate assemblage of boned and cooked pig snout stuffed with pig tongue and vegetables. “There aren’t any kebabs here!” said Michel Toulet, the director of Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, the group that organizes the event.

“Here, we have cider, we have beer from the Limousin region. It’s only local products, and we care about it.” The Frairie des Petits Ventres was created in 1973 by Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, an association of preservationists and butchers who blocked plans to demolish the old city center.

The butchers showed their commitment, they said, by putting up stalls outside their shops to sell cooked innards and local specialties. “Our neighborhood is unique,” said Genevieve Mausset-Cibot, the senior butcher from an ancient butchers’ family. “So we had to revive the old trade and show another way to sell our products.” Butchers have a long and important history here, often overshadowing the local nobility in power and prestige.

They established a medieval guild, and legend has it that they grew so wealthy that they lent money to the kings. When King Henry IV visited in the 17th century, he was greeted by a delegation of butchers, as was President Francois Mitterrand in 1982. The Frairie des Petits Ventres aims to bring butchers and tripe-sellers back into fashion, at a time when industrialization of meat products and occurrences of mad cow disease have deprived them of regular customers.

“We work on a magnificent product,” said Jean-Pierre Ribiere, the last tripe maker of Limoges , speaking in this case of the heart. “But for the man in the street, it’s only an organ meat.”