The bocage of Normandy: apples, cream and butter

The bocage is the country of small enclosed fields, hedgerows and sunken lanes that covers much of lower Normandy, the Manche, the Calvados uplands and the Orne. Its pastures, wet and green under a mild Channel climate, are the ground on which the region's cooking was built: cattle on grass, orchards in the hedges, and the dairy that follows from both. Anne Willan, in French Regional Cooking, places Normandy among the great dairy provinces of France and treats its cooking as the cooking of a farmland rather than of a court.

The hedged field gives the bocage its character. Banks planted with thorn, hazel and beech shelter the cattle from the wind off the Channel, mark the boundaries of each holding, and carry the apple and pear trees that supply the cider orchards. The rain that falls through most of the year keeps the grass long and rich, and it is this grass, more than any technique of the kitchen, that determines the quality of the milk, the cream and the butter of the region. Three products stand at the centre of the Norman table. Butter, particularly the lightly salted butter of the coast and the cultured butter of the Isigny country, is the cooking fat of the region where other provinces use lard, goose fat or oil. Crème fraîche, thick and faintly acid, is cooked into sauces and finishes meat, fish and vegetables. The apple, eaten, pressed for cider, distilled into Calvados and reduced into vinegar and jelly, completes the trio. Willan sets out how these three combine in the dishes that carry the name vallée d'Auge: veal, chicken, pork or fish cooked in butter, flamed with Calvados, and finished with cream and apples. The cheeses of the region belong to the same pasture. Camembert de Normandie, Livarot and Pont-l'Évêque are protected under AOC and AOP designations, which tie them to defined zones and to milk from Norman cattle fed on local grass. Neufchâtel, a white-rind cheese of the Pays de Bray, is likewise protected. Each is a means of keeping the milk of a wet country beyond the day on which it was drawn. The coast adds its own supplies to the bocage. Sole, turbot, scallops and mussels are cooked in the same cider, butter and cream, and the dish of sole normande, sauced with a reduction of the cooking liquor, mussels and cream, shows the two halves of the province meeting in a single pan. Salt-meadow lamb from the bays, raised on pasture washed by the tide, completes a table in which land and sea are never far apart. What unites the whole is restraint of method. The cooking of the bocage relies on slow simmering, on the reduction of cider and cream, and on butter added at the end, and it asks of the cook patience and good raw material rather than elaboration.

The taste of the bocage is one of acidity set against richness. The sharpness of the apple and the dry, faintly bitter edge of cider cut through the weight of butter and cream, and Calvados adds a warm, fruited aroma at the end of the cooking. At table the same logic holds: a dry or brut cider, or a glass of Calvados taken between courses, answers the fat of the dishes and keeps a rich meal in balance.