TGIFOOD

FRENCH LETTER

A Taste of Normandy, from Madame Bovary to Blood Sausage

A Taste of Normandy, from Madame Bovary to Blood Sausage
Two famous Normandy cheeses, Camembert and Neufchatel, with apple pastry on the side. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

If you love good books as much as you love good food, a trip through Normandy can feel like a treasure hunt, with surprises – literary and gastronomic – waiting around every corner.

It is an iron law of food literature that the people who think only about food are the ones who write worst about it. This is the attention-grabbing first sentence of a cookbook review written by Steven Poole for The Guardian. The book in question is Jonathan Meades’ The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, an irreverent and entertaining read, because Meades is a man of broad culture who will, in his food writing, “quote Robbe-Grillet, Swift and Montaigne as easily as Elizabeth David”.

The rest of Steven Poole’s succulent review can be read here, but meanwhile I’m using this first sentence as the perfect excuse to write about a trip to Normandy that combined literary pleasure with culinary joy in equal measures. Hopefully most of TGIFood’s readers are not the kind of “barely literate foodists” whom Poole gleefully describes as “wibbling about their own genius in having… appreciated a dog sperm velouté”.

Apples in abundance all over Normandy. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

Normandy’s most appreciated and abundant food products are apples and milk – and everything that can be made from these gifts of nature, including cider and Calvados, creamy butter and world-famous cheeses. Think Camembert, the real McCoy manufactured since the 18th century in the town of Camembert, and the square-shaped Pont l’Évêque, made by monks since at least the 12th century in the vicinity of (yes, you guessed it) Pont-l’Évêque, and the pungent orange-yellow Livarot, also originally produced by monks from the community of Livarot.

What would today’s cheese lovers have done without those gourmet monks of long ago, I often wonder.

Impossible to name all the Normandy cheeses here, but the almost indecently creamy Brillat-Savarin, created in 1890 by the Dubec family as a cheese called Excelsior and renamed after the great food writer in the 1930s, deserves special mention. There are also many new kids on this ancient block, proving that the fine art of cheese making is still thriving in Normandy. Boursin, flavoured with herbs and spices, was created as recently as 1957 by the cheese maker François Boursin, and Brin de Paille was created barely 20 years ago. Regarded as a lesser form of Brie by many French cheese lovers, because it does not have quite enough “character”, Brin de Paille is often adored by Americans and other foreigners who are only starting out on the life-long journey of cheese discovery. 

A journey I know only too well, having made giant leaps in my own cheese education since I came to live in France more than two decades ago. When I first arrived here, an Afrikaans girl raised on mild Gouda and odourless Cheddar, even a well-ripened Brie de Meaux would have been too potent for my underdeveloped taste buds. By now I’ll eat any good cheese you throw at me, the smellier the better, and probably ask for more.

So cheese was a big part of what drew me to Normandy, while my more bloodthirsty French beloved longed for specialities like tripes à la mode de Caen (classic tripe stew made from all four parts of a cow’s stomach as well as hooves and bones), boudin or blood sausage from Mortagne, and Rouen-style duckling served with a sauce made from the young duck’s blood. As with the cheeses that often carry the name of their town of origin, many of these meaty dishes are also inextricably linked to specific towns in Normandy.

Others, though, are more broadly regional, like estouffade (beef stew with cider) and escalope à la Normande, made from veal (or poultry) cooked with cider, once again, but also adding a dash of Calvados and the unsurpassed fresh cream of Normandy. The crème de la crème of French dairy products (in the most literal sense of the phrase) is the thick, rich, almost yellow Isigny cream.

But I have to confess that what really lured me to Normandy, even more than its glorious gastronomic heritage, was literature. The region’s most illustrious literary products are Gustave Flaubert, born in Rouen, and his novel Madame Bovary, set in and around the town of Rouen. After all, if Flaubert could famously (and probably apocryphally) declare “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”, then I, along with millions of other readers, can also find a little bit of myself in his flawed but oh so human heroine.

Rouen’s cathedral, featured in Monet’s paintings and Flaubert’s writing, left, and the writer getting closer to Flaubert in the Literary Hotel Gustave Flaubert. (Photos: Marita van der Vyver and Alain Claisse)

Indeed, we are all Emma Bovary, we mused as we followed her fictional trail through the streets of Rouen – although we were constantly sidetracked by delicious culinary products displayed in the windows of small shops. Not to mention the tempting menus of many restaurants along the way. Of course we visited the cathedral with its three soaring towers, built and rebuilt over more than eight centuries, featured in a series of Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet – another famous son of the Normandy soil whose impressive garden at Giverny we would also visit on this trip. 

But for me the main attraction of the cathedral was as the setting of a clandestine meeting between Emma and her soon-to-be lover Léon. As they leave the cathedral they jump into a hired horse-drawn carriage for a frantic drive through Rouen and beyond, during which Emma finally and fatefully succumbs to Léon’s advances. What exactly happens inside the carriage, tossing about like a vessel, is only suggested by the clever Flaubert – as his defence lawyer pointed out when he was promptly put on trial for obscenity after the novel’s publication.

Somewhere along the route Emma tears up the letter of rebuke she wanted to give to the young man (a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom), and the rest is left to the reader’s imagination. Flaubert was acquitted in the obscenity trial in 1857, the book became an overnight bestseller in France, and its fame is still spreading two centuries later.

Not far from the cathedral, still under Emma’s wicked influence, I also succumbed. Not to an illicit lover, but to a fromagerie selling a seductive heart-shaped cheese called Neufchatel. Perhaps the oldest of all Normandy’s cheeses, believed to be produced as far back as the 6th century in the Kingdom of the Franks, it is also sold in square and round shapes – although apparently young girls of the region were already offering heart-shaped cheeses to English soldiers during the Hundred Years’ War which ended in 1453. So definitely not a newbie, this one.

Sucre de Rouen – traditional sweets as a remedy for melancholy and other ailments. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

Continuing to combine literary and gustatory pleasures, we enjoyed coffee and cake at the Literary Hotel Gustave Flaubert, which houses an informal museum and gift shop dedicated to the author, with a copy of his famous parrot hanging from the ceiling and a life-sized statue of the man himself gazing longingly at the parrot. In the gift shop we bought some beautiful page markers with quotes from Flaubert’s novels, as well as the emblematic sweet called Sucre de Rouen. These small sticks made of sugar and apples were created by a local pharmacist in 1592 as a remedy against melancholy.

I don’t usually enjoy sugary bonbons, but since reading good books often causes melancholy, as any reader knows, I couldn’t resist this age-old “medicine”.

We also bought a box of madeleines, another literary comestible made famous by another writer with a connection to Normandy. I am of course referring to Proust’s madeleine, dipped in tea, triggering a flood of childhood memories in the first of the seven volumes of his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. Although Marcel Proust was born on the outskirts of Paris and buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in that city, Á la recherche du temps perdu is partly set in Normandy.

Proust’s madeleines – these are from Normandy. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

The novel’s fictional seaside resort of Balbec is called Cabourg in real life, and the Grand Hotel where Proust spent seven consecutive summers in Room 414 on the fourth floor is still operating. The family home of the novel’s narrator in the fictional village of Combray, actually the real village of Illiers (later renamed Illiers-Combray in homage to the novel), is just across the eastern border of Normandy.

We didn’t get to Cabourg, because the coast of Normandy deserves a journey all of its own, with a whole different range of gastronomic delights derived from fish and shell food, which we promised ourselves we would explore next time. We might even plan a literary and gastronomic trip around Proust, who probably also deserves a voyage of his own.

For now we were content to nibble on some madeleines from Biscuiterie Jeannette 1850 close to Caen, where the small shell-shaped sponge cakes have been manufactured for almost two centuries. The original madeleines were created in the Lorraine region, but they’ve long since been claimed by the entire nation as quintessentially French, and the Normandy manufacturers have added more modern flavours such as pistachio and citrus fruit to the traditional recipe. Biscuiterie Jeannette 1850 also offers a luxury range, created by a master chef, with flavours like Damas rose, raspberry and mandarine.

‘Tears of Joan of Arc’ – chocolate-covered almonds. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

Another sweet speciality of Rouen is the chocolate-covered almonds called The Tears of Joan of Arc, because the peasant girl who became the saviour of France (and a saint after her death) was burned on the stake for heresy in this town. She was not a fictional character, although her life story was so extraordinary that it sounds like fiction and has been turned into numerous books and films. So it seemed strangely appropriate that our literary trail in the footsteps of Emma Bovary also took us past the town square where Jeanne d’Arc died in 1431.

And then of course we had to taste the saint’s “tears”, sold in a cute little blue and white box, because this was after all a culinary journey too.

A simple meal in Jumièges – boudin (blood sausage) and buckwheat-flour pancake filled with local Camembert. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

But in our quest for traditional Normandy tastes, we kept bumping into literary references. In the village of Jumièges, for instance, we spent a night simply because it was close enough to Rouen and boasted the remains of a monastery founded in 654 that had been called “the most beautiful ruins in France”. While looking for a small bistro to have a light supper, we walked past the family house where the writer Maurice Leblanc spent his childhood summers.

Maurice Who? you might well ask.

I did – and my partner told me he was the creator of the charming “gentleman thief” Arsène Lupin, whom everyone knows nowadays, mainly because a recent French TV series with Omar Sy in the title role became a world-wide hit. Leblanc was also born in Rouen, I now know, but his fictional protagonist’s fame far outstrips his own. 

Enjoying a view of ‘the most beautiful ruins in France’ while dining in Jumièges. (Photo: Marita van der Vyver)

We enjoyed our supper within view of Arsène Lupin’s creator’s house, across the street from the truly beautiful ruins of the Abbey of Jumièges. I chose a Breton-style pancake made from buckwheat flour and filled with melting Camembert from the region, and my partner was thrilled to find a local blood sausage on the menu. Another example of a serendipitous combination of literature, food, history and architecture that can turn any trip into a memorable cultural experience.

Or, in Proust’s words: A shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me… and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. What more could any traveller ask for? DM/TGIFood

Follow Marita van der Vyver on Instagram @fakingfrench

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