Normandy’s bucolic heart shows off the best of la belle France. Staunchly agricultural, no other region devotes so much of its land to pastoral farming. And this plays out across its culinary experiences, from baking cider bread in the centurion-stone oven of a apple orchard to sampling the heavenly taste of buttery camembert, handcrafted with passion and ancestral know-how on a family farm.
Cruising empty country lanes in the Pays d’Auge is a blissful invitation to slow right down. The chequerboard sweep of fertile green, hedge-trimmed fields, peppered with patchy white-and-chestnut Normande cows and half-timbered farmsteads, is magnificently scenic by car or bicycle. Apple and pear orchards blaze pink in spring and fire-red in autumn, while feasting on seasonal fruits in pretty village auberges (inns) is an epicurean highlight. Eco-minded chefs here were cooking up a gastronomic storm with local, organic farm produce long before the trend for ‘zero mile cuisine’ was coined.
History buffs won’t be disappointed, either. William the Conqueror grew up in the rolling hills of Suisse Normande, later shipping creamy Caen limestone across the Channel as Norman king of England to build the White Tower at the Tower of
