Normandy Food and Drink
Cheese, apples and cream, in that order. Normandy has no wine and does not want any: the orchards do the work here, and four protected cheeses come from within a couple of hours of the landing beaches. excursions in Normandy do not include a dedicated food tour, and this page says where to find the food anyway.
There is no food tour here, and what to do instead
Worth stating plainly rather than implying otherwise: none of these departures is a food or drink tour. What several of them do is stop somewhere you can eat, and one carries a packed lunch. If eating well is a priority, build it around a full-day tour rather than instead of one — the guides know which village to stop in, and and your day is better for it.
The four protected cheeses, and where each comes from
| Cheese | Where it is from | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Camembert de Normandie | Camembert, Orne — a village of about two hundred people | Soft, raw cow’s milk, ladled by hand. The protected version is not the supermarket one |
| Livarot | Pays d’Auge, Calvados | Washed rind, bound with five strips of reed or paper, which is where the nickname ‘the colonel’ comes from |
| Pont-l’Évêque | Pont-l’Évêque, Calvados | Square, washed rind, and the oldest of the four — recorded in the thirteenth century |
| Neufchâtel | Pays de Bray, Seine-Maritime | Bloomy rind, often heart-shaped, and the sharpest of them |
All four carry a protected designation of origin, which means the name is tied to the place and the method rather than to a recipe anybody can copy.
Cider, pommeau and Calvados
The apple runs through everything here. Cider is the everyday drink and comes dry or sweet, in a bottle with a cork. Pommeau is unfermented apple juice blended with young apple brandy and drunk as an aperitif. Calvados is the brandy itself, aged in oak, and the department it is named after is where five of these tours begin.
The Route du Cidre
A signposted forty-kilometre loop through the Pays d’Auge, inland from Caen, past half-timbered farms that sell at the gate. It runs through Beuvron-en-Auge and Cambremer and it takes an afternoon with a car. It is the part of Normandy that looks the way people imagine Normandy looks, and no D-Day itinerary goes near it.
What the sea brings in
The Channel coast lands scallops, sole, turbot and oysters, and the ports at Port-en-Bessin and Honfleur sell them a short walk from where they are landed. Sole normande is the dish the region is named in — sole poached and finished with cream, mussels and shrimp. Moules with cider rather than wine is the everyday version.
Where a tour day leaves room to eat
Read the fare before you plan your lunch. Only one departure here carries food with it, and that is the cruise day out of Le Havre, which packs a lunch and will cater for a dietary requirement given seventy-two hours’ notice. Every other day either stops somewhere you can buy something or leaves it to you entirely.
In practice that works out better than it sounds, because the stop is usually chosen by somebody who eats there. On the private days from Paris and Caen your guide will send you somewhere they eat themselves, and on the full days from Bayeux the break tends to fall in a village with a boulangerie rather than at a motorway services. If you want a proper lunch, say so when you book: on a private day the running order bends around it.
Salt-marsh lamb below Mont-Saint-Michel
Agneau de pré-salé grazes the flats around Mont-Saint-Michel, where the tide covers the grass with salt water twice a day and the meat takes the taste of it. You will see the flocks from the causeway on the way to the island. It is on menus all round the bay and it is the one thing worth ordering there rather than the omelette.
You will find the same logic all over this region: what grows here is what you should eat here, and almost none of it travels. Places to visit tells you which towns have the markets worth timing a morning around, and Normandy Excursions lists the days that leave you time for one.