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A good website about norman gastronomy
My favorite restaurants... (soon)
Normandy
A few words about gastronomy...
Authentic and diverse, Norman gastronomy comes also from the use of the best products reflecting the weath of a soil whose chiefs are proud to make share savours and flavours. Butter and cream hold a place of privilege in all culinary preparations, from starters to desserts, and the cheeses - camembert made with unpasteurized milk, Pont L'Evêque, Livarot, Pavé d'Auge and Neufchâtel - are particularly tasty.
Specialities : Calvados, Cambremer cider, Pommeau, Isigny cream, cheese, seafood, salty butter tofees , andouille de Vire
The pork-butchery : L’andouille de Vire (a sausage made of chitterlings and eaten cold), Caen tripe, Ferté-Macé and Longny tripe, black sausage of Mortagne, white sausage of Essay, andouillette of Alençon, le cervelas à l’Aigle, le pied de mouton au Neubourg, le boudin de Saint-Romain à la crème et au calvados. Liver foie gras and magret, rillettes de canard, Duck à la Rouennaise : the duck is stuffed then cooked. It is served with a blood sauce.jambon du Cotentin.
Vegetables : Normandy owns a healthy and generous soil who allows vegetables culture : carrots de Créances, sand carrots, navets, leaks de Créances, primeur potatoes, choux fleur…
Fruits & desserts : The apple is the queen of Norman fruits. Apples are used to concoct the most delicious tarts : made with pie crust or puff pastry, simply served with a bit of crème fraîche or flambéed with calvados. The pears Louise Bonne d’Avranche. Crêpes : sweet or savoury, made from buckwheat or wheat, they are perfect any time of the day with a bowl of cider.
Drinks : Cider AOC : The juice extracted from the apple becomes cider after fermentation. Like a great wine, cider is described by its colour, its nose, its flavour and its taste. There are three sorts of cider: sweet cider (fermentation at 2.5°); dry cider between 4 and 5° proof; and traditional cider, which is much drier at 5° proof and is made and drunk on the farm. Perry is made in the same way as cider, but from pears.
The famous Norman "calva" is made by distilling cider. Its manufacture is strictly controlled. Two distillations a year are allowed: one in spring and the other in autumn. To make a litre of Calvados at 100% alcohol, one needs about twenty litres of cider at 5°, in other words, around 27 kg of apples. The calvados then ages in extremely dry oak barrels. Since the 16th century, at harvest time, the fruitiest cider apple juice is mixed with the calvados in order to keep its taste. At the beginning of the 1970s, this mixture was named Pommeau of Normandy and in 1991 it received the "appellation d'origine contrôlée" (AOC).
Fish and seafood : Normandy is the main scallop-producing region. Mussels are cultivated in the Bay of Mont Saint-Miche and Cotentin which is also famous for its oyesters and lobsters. The region benefits from all sorts of seafood: fish, shellfish and crustaceans. Fécamp, Dives-sur-Mer, Courseulles-sur-Mer, Arromanches-les-Bains, Houlgate, Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, Cherbourg, Mont-Saint-Michel bay, are famous for their grey shrimps. Fish from Dieppe and Fecamp carrelet, cabillaud, lieu, turbot, barbue, la sole, le hareng, le maquereau (Lisette, si petit), le bar de ligne… etc. Turbot with cream : the turbot caught near the Norman coast goes particularly well with Norman sauce: a simple béchamel enriched with cream.