The food of Normandy owes its most distinctive characteristic - its gut-bursting, heart-pounding richness - to the lush orchards and dairy herds of its agricultural heartland, and most especially the area southeast of Caen known as the Pays d'Auge. Menus abound in meat such as veal ( veau ) cooked in vallée d'Auge style, which consists largely of the profligate addition of cream and butter. Many dishes also feature orchard fruit, either in its natural state or in successively more alcoholic forms - either as apple or pear cider, or perhaps further distilled to produce brandies.

 

Normans have a great propensity for blood and guts. In addition to gamier meat and fowl such as rabbit and duck (a speciality in Rouen, where the birds are strangled to ensure that all their blood gets into the sauce), they enjoy such intestinal preparations as andouilles , the sausages known in English as chitterlings, and tripes , stewed for hours à la mode de Caen . A full blowout at a country restaurant in one of the small towns of inland Normandy - places like Conches, Vire and the Suisse Normande - will also traditionally entail one or two pauses between courses for the trou normand : a glass of Calvados while you catch your breath before struggling on with the feast.

Normandy's long coastline ensures that it is also a wonderful region for seafood . Many of the larger ports and resorts have long waterfront lines of restaurants competing for attention, each with its " copieuse" assiette de fruits de mer . Honfleur is probably the most enjoyable of these, but Dieppe, Cherbourg and Granville also spring to mind as offering endless eating opportunities. The menus tend to be much the same as those on offer in Brittany , if perhaps slightly more expensive.

The most famous products of Normandy's meadow-munching cows are, of course, their cheeses . The tradition of cheese-making in the Pays d'Auge is thought to have started in the monasteries during the Dark Ages. By the eleventh century the local products were already well defined; in 1236, the Roman de la Rose referred to Angelot cheese, identified with a small coin depicting a young angel killing a dragon. The principal modern varieties began to emerge in the seventeenth century - Pont l'Evêque , which is square with a washed crust, soft but not runny, and Livarot , which is round, thick and firm, and has a stronger flavour. Although Marie Herel is generally credited with having invented Camembert in the 1790s, a smaller and stodgier version of that cheese had already existed for some time. A priest fleeing the Revolution seems to have stayed in Mme Herel's farmhouse at Camembert, and suggested modifications in her cheese-making in line with the techniques he'd seen employed to manufacture Brie de Meaux - a slower process, gentler on the curd and with more thorough drainage. The rich full cheese thus created was an instant success in the market at Vimoutiers, and the development of the railways (and the invention of the chipboard cheesebox in 1880) helped to give it a worldwide popularity.