Pays d'Auge

The Pays d’Auge is the part of Normandy that the travel itineraries skip, and this is exactly why I love it. While the crowds assemble at the cliff edge in Étretat and queue for the tapestry in Bayeux, this inland region of apple orchards, sunken lanes, and half-timbered farmhouses mostly conducts its business in peace. The business, here, is food. Specifically: the production of Calvados — the apple brandy that defines Norman drinking culture — and the four great AOC cheeses of the region: Camembert, Livarot, Pont-l’Évêque, and Pavé d’Auge, each one made within a few kilometres of the others, each one completely distinct.

I drove into the region on an October morning, the car windows fogged with the damp that hangs over the bocage in autumn, and took the Route du Cidre — a signposted loop through the villages of Beuvron-en-Auge, Cambremer, Bonnebosq, and a dozen other places too small to have their own petrol station. The orchards on either side of the road were heavy with apples in various states of decline — some had already fallen and were fermenting in the grass, filling the air with a sweet, slightly yeasty smell that I have since been unable to separate from the idea of Normandy. At one ferme-auberge outside Cambremer, I pulled over because a hand-painted sign on a gate said simply DÉGUSTATION and I am not someone who ignores hand-painted signs.

The farmer was perhaps sixty-five and spoke no English and looked at me with the mild suspicion that rural Normans apply to anyone arriving in a rental car, which dissolved when I attempted a sentence in French about his cider. He led me through a wooden barn into a room that smelled of apples and oak barrels and time, and over the next forty minutes I tasted five different products — a brut cider, a demi-sec, a Pommeau (which is cider juice blended with calvados before fermentation), and then two different calvados, one young and sharp and the other aged twelve years in oak and as complex as anything that comes out of Cognac. I bought two bottles of the twelve-year. I still think about it.

The cheeses of the Pays d’Auge are not subtle, and you should not approach them hoping for subtlety. The Livarot — called “the Colonel” because of the strips of paper that ring it like military stripes — has a washed rind of deep orange and a smell that serious cheese people describe as “barn-like,” which is a polite way of saying it fills a room. The flavour inside is something else entirely: creamy, nutty, with a finish that stays. The Camembert made within the AOC boundaries here — genuine Camembert de Normandie, made from raw milk and moulded by hand, not the supermarket pasteurised version — is a completely different object from what is sold under that name elsewhere. If your only experience of Camembert is the flat white disk in the round wooden box at a supermarket, you have not yet had Camembert.

The village of Beuvron-en-Auge is the region’s most photogenic — a tight cluster of half-timbered houses around a small square, the woodwork painted dark and the plasterwork white, flower boxes at the windows, the whole thing so composed it looks like a stage set for a Norman village. It is also genuinely inhabited and functioning: there is a cheese shop, a cider producer who gives tastings out of his garage, and a restaurant that does a three-course Norman lunch for a price that seems like a misprint. Eat the teurgoule — a slow-baked rice pudding flavoured with cinnamon that has been the regional dessert since the seventeenth century. It is warm and dense and exactly right for a cold afternoon between orchards.

When to go: September and October are definitive. The apple harvest runs through those months, the air smells of fermenting fruit, and the farm tastings are at full operation. The spring wildflower season — April and May — brings a different but equally beautiful version of the landscape. Avoid mid-July to August when the region gets warm and the tourist traffic picks up even here.