Normandy is one of the most popular regions among travelers, thanks to its rich history, its cuisine and its scenery. My goal with this article is to give you, if you’re planning a visit to this region, a bit of historical and culinary background that will make your trip richer and serve as an introduction to a walking itinerary for Normandy that I’ll give you later.
The History of Normandy
The Vikings Create Normandy, Then… Conquer England
In the ancient languages of Europe, Latin, Celtic and others, the meaning of the name NOR-MAN, even with different spellings, is always the same: “men of the north.” This is the name Europeans gave to the Viking warriors who invaded the continent by sea and river during the 9th century CE.
The Viking ruler Rollo (846-930), who invaded the coast of France from the north, was the first to take control of nearly all of northern France and unite it into a single entity under his rule, after capturing the city of Rouen in 876. He submitted to the French king’s authority, and in exchange for his agreement to convert to Christianity and swear loyalty to the French crown, he retained broad autonomy under a name derived from “men of the north”: Normandy.
Rollo founded a royal dynasty, and one of his descendants, William the Conqueror (1027-1087), conquered the British Isles after a crushing victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, crowning himself king of England while still ruling part of France.
In 1204, the French king Philip II, known as “Augustus” (1165-1223), managed to retake the region, and the king of England recognized French rule over Normandy. From that point on, Normandy belonged to the French crown for good. During and after the Middle Ages, the region remained a bone of contention between the English and the French, mostly over its agricultural wealth and control of the sea: the English Channel, which the French call “La Manche,” “the sleeve,” for its shape.
Francophile’s note: France did win back all of Normandy’s territory in 1204, with the exception of the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. This was due to a lawyer’s mistake: whoever drafted the peace treaty between the English and French kings forgot to include the islands in it. As a result, these islands still belong to the British crown today, and the queen of England rules them under the title of Duke of Normandy (yes, I didn’t get that wrong: under the laws of the Duchy of Normandy, it can only be ruled by a “duke,” so even a woman holds that exact title).
The Middle Ages: Basilicas, Cathedrals and Joan of Arc
Normandy continued to flourish under the rule of the kings of France, who built castles for defense against the English and other invaders, along with towns and villages. But the most important buildings you’ll come across on a trip through Normandy are the religious ones (churches, basilicas, cathedrals and so on), and it’s worth pausing for a moment to say a few words about them.
What’s the difference between a cathedral, a church, a basilica and a chapel?
The Christian world has a great many churches, and it’s common to find several in a single town (Judaism has something similar, with multiple synagogues in one community, organized by community of origin, by family, by donations made for a particular occasion, and so on. The same pattern shows up in other religions too, including Islam and Buddhism.)
A church, a house of prayer, is local, communal, often built to commemorate an event or a donation. Almost any good reason can lead to a church being founded as a place of worship. A cathedral, by contrast, is different: with rare exceptions, every major city has only one. The word comes from the Latin “cathedra,” meaning “seat,” because this was the city where the bishop, one and only, the Catholic Church’s representative in the region, held his seat. From there the word evolved into “cathedral,” meaning the seat of the bishop.
A basilica is a church like any other, but the special title marks the fact that its crypt holds a single, especially sacred relic (a thorn from Christ’s crown, a nail, a splinter of wood from the cross, and so on). A handful of basilicas received special papal approval to carry this title for some other reason, usually a special service rendered to the Catholic Church.
A chapel, on the other hand, was originally a church inside a private home: a single room set aside for prayer. The custom developed during the age of castles and palaces, when the lord of the manor preferred not to mingle with commoners and chose a “private” church inside his own residence instead. Over the years, the term also came to describe a dedicated prayer room inside a larger church, usually a rounded alcove opening off the main body of the building.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, we can continue down the path of Normandy’s history.
Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years’ War
After a little more than a century in which the Duchy of Normandy was part of the Kingdom of France, a war of succession broke out between the French king Philip VI and the English king Edward III. During this war, Normandy changed hands repeatedly, and for many years it was ruled by the English.
The most famous figure of that era is of course Joan of Arc, who managed to turn the tide of the war, but who ultimately was burned at the stake in the city of Rouen, Normandy’s capital.
If you want to dig deeper into Joan of Arc and the history of the Hundred Years’ War, I recommend reading the article Joan of Arc: Witch or Saint?
World War II and the Allied Landings of 1944
In June 1940, Adolf Hitler completed his conquest of France. Together with Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy, who had allied themselves with him, the Nazi party had taken control of nearly the entire European continent. Pockets of resistance remained, of course: shattered regular armies, partisans in the forests, and the machinery of genocide against targeted groups (Roma people, gay people, Jews and others) was not yet complete, but the continent was his.
On the other side, the Allied armies of the free nations kept up their struggle to topple and destroy the dark regime. In May 1943, a secret meeting (the “Trident” conference) was held in Washington between the leaders of the countries involved in the Western Front, Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain, and Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States, along with senior officers from both armies.
Three issues were on the table: opening a new front in Italy following the victory in North Africa and with the invasion of Sicily being planned, planning aid to China in its struggle against the Japanese army in the Pacific and East Asia, and preparations for a decisive invasion of Europe, most likely on the coast of Normandy.
When the leaders parted on May 25, 1943, the operational framework had been agreed upon. Operation Overlord was declared the operation for the invasion of Europe and the establishment of a fighting beachhead on occupied soil, set for May 1944. Operation Neptune was defined as a separate operation: planning the invasion of the beaches of the English Channel, along Normandy’s northern coast.
Operation Neptune had three parts:
- Crossing the English Channel at night using thousands of vessels, in order to reach the coast by dawn.
- Dropping British and American paratroopers behind the German positions on the Normandy coast, to help draw German attention away from the beaches themselves.
- Bombing German industrial centers and fortified areas from the air, both to weaken them and to mislead the Germans into believing the invasion was planned for the northern coast of France.
On June 6, 1944 (after a one-month delay due to stormy weather in the Channel), the Allies invaded occupied Europe on the beaches of Normandy. The invasion, on the day known as “D-Day” (well told in the classic film “The Longest Day”), was carried out through five beachheads across five different sections of the Normandy coast:
- Sword Beach in the east (the Ouistreham area)
- Juno Beach (the Ver-sur-Mer area)
- Gold Beach (the Arromanches-les-Bains area)
- Omaha Beach (the St.-Laurent area) and Utah Beach in the west (the St.-Martin-de-Varreville area).
After brutal fighting across every sector, with events and stories that have become fixed in human history forever, the Allied forces advanced and took first Normandy, then all of France (the German forces stationed in Paris surrendered on August 25, 1944). Nazi Germany saw its end approaching, until it surrendered to Soviet forces advancing from the east on May 2, 1945, when the German general Weidling, military commander of Berlin, ordered his forces to lay down their weapons before the Russian general Vasily Chuikov.
If you’d like to read more about the Allied invasion of Normandy, I invite you to check out the article D-Day: Operations Fortitude and Overlord.
Today, Normandy is an integral part of the French Republic, unlike Brittany, its neighbor to the west, which still hopes for independence but has, for lack of a better option, settled for partial autonomy.
The Normandy Region: What’s There?
Normandy has always been a mostly agricultural region. It has a handful of mid-sized cities, the capital Rouen, along with Caen, Le Havre, Lisieux and others, but most of its roughly 3.5 million residents live in small rural towns or villages.
Today, the economy of the Normandy region is highly diverse (energy, electronics, textiles and more), but without a doubt, its two leading sectors are tourism and agriculture.
Tourism
Seaside tourism, scenic tourism and memorial tourism are the leading categories here. Despite the passing decades, the D-Day beaches still draw thousands of travelers. The beach resorts and seaside towns along the English Channel compete with each other for visitors, and the sights and landscapes throughout the region are considered beautiful and appealing. Part of the region, rich in hills and scenery, is known as “Suisse Normande,” or “Norman Switzerland.”
Agriculture
The region is considered “the dairy barn of France.” Very few places in the world outproduce Normandy in milk yield, and dairy accounts for 35% of the region’s total agricultural output. That abundance of milk has created a long-standing local tradition of dairy products: cream, butter and more varieties of cheese on the shelves than any traveler could keep straight (France produces around 1,000 different cheeses).
Fishing is also abundant here, in a region where the sea is never truly far from any town. The combination of raw ingredients from the sea, the local dairy tradition, and generations of imagination and creativity have pushed French cuisine to gastronomic heights that have no rival anywhere in the world. Cooking with butter and cream became, long ago, a symbol of rich (and fattening) French cooking.
An important aside: Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée
The French agricultural industry is rich and highly diverse. It is tightly regulated, with detailed rules and regulations across several sectors that define exactly which product, made where, may carry which name.
For example, not every brandy made somewhere is allowed to be called “Cognac”: only the brandy produced in the region of that name. In the same way, not every sparkling wine can be called “Champagne,” only the wines produced in the Champagne region.
These rules, known in French as “Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée” (“controlled designation of origin,” meaning a product’s original name is protected and regulated), were established at the end of the 19th century and were originally meant for the wine industry. The framework and the idea were quickly adopted for other kinds of products too. Today there are equivalent rules for cheeses, meat and sausage, hot red pepper, lavender perfume, honey and more.
Over the years, other European countries adopted the idea and the system. From this you can understand why comparing “Brie” to “Pont l’Évêque,” “Picodon,” “Boursin” or “Reblochon” is a sin, a crime and a serious offense against everything the French hold sacred. But there’s no way around it: it has to be explained to travelers who grew up only knowing generic “white cheese” and “yellow cheese,” or who don’t eat cheese at all.
The Apples of Normandy
What do you do with that many apples?
Within all this agriculture, the region developed an industry around deciduous fruit: plums, peaches, pears and, above all, apples, which have been grown here since the days of the Celtic tribes. In the Normandy region alone there are around 700 apple varieties on record, with a few thousand across all of France.
The region produces around 330,000 tons of apples every year, about half of all apple production in France. Beyond “ordinary” apple dishes, cakes, jams, stews, the French have mastered (and enjoy drinking) two apple-based beverages in this region. Cidre is apple juice that has gone through fermentation, much like wine, in which part of the fruit’s sugar turns into alcohol.
“Soft” cidre contains up to 3% alcohol and is gentle, slightly sweet and not sharp. “Half-dry” cidre contains 3-5% alcohol. Cidre Brut (“wild” or raw cidre, not refined to reduce alcohol) contains over 4.5% alcohol, with some reaching as high as 7%. The next step in distilling apple drink produces Calvados (the French often shorten it to “Calva”). This is an apple brandy that has been made in the region since the mid-16th century (first mentioned in writing in 1553).
The drink is made from a base of good-quality cidre, to which up to 200 different apple varieties are added to round out and refine the flavor, much like a winemaker blending grapes, and here too the producer is called the “Maître de Chai” (“master of the cellar”). Calvados is distilled and aged in oak barrels for at least two years, until it reaches a chestnut color (similar to cognac) with an alcohol content of 40-50%. You can find bottles of Calvados aged 15, 20, 30 years and even older. Strict rules, similar to those for wine, Champagne and Cognac, govern its production and sale.
Little Stories About a Lot of Apples
The “Norman Hole,” Trou Normand
Normandy’s culture is steeped entirely in apples, and especially in the popular drink Calvados. Alongside the region’s rich, heavy cuisine (butter, cream, did we mention?), a custom developed here, and later spread across all of France, called the “middle drink” (Coup du Milieu).
To ease a stomach aching from a rich, multi-course meal (a festive meal in France can run to seven courses: starter, fish, soup, meat, green salad, cheese, dessert), it’s customary to serve a small glass of strong liquor after the meat course, to “clean out” the stomach and intestines. Naturally, in Normandy, that glass is Calva.
Over the years, a small bowl of fruit sorbet (a light, water-based ice, as opposed to cream-based ice cream) was added to the glass of liquor. Historians and food writers claim that this custom, the Trou Normand, is documented under a different name as far back as the poems of the Roman poet Terence, who lived in Rome in the 1st century BCE, though apparently without the ice cream yet.
Tarte Tatin
Everyone knows and loves the upside-down apple cake (tarte, a baked cake, in French), which many attribute to Norman cuisine (apples, of course). Few people know where it actually came from, or when and how it was created. Here’s the story, as it happened…
Between 1894 and 1906, Caroline Tatin ran a family hotel (“Hôtel Tatin”), together with her younger sister, Stéphanie, in the small town of Lamotte-Beuvron, about 50 km south of Orléans and about 200 km south of Paris. Caroline handled management and service, and Stéphanie ran the kitchen.
On one Sunday, the first day of hunting season in the region’s forests, with the hotel restaurant overwhelmed by the crowd, Stéphanie forgot to make the dough and put a pan full of apple slices covered in a layer of sugar straight into the oven, without the pastry base the cake needed. When the baking time was up, Stéphanie pulled the cake out of the oven, and her face fell at the sight of the apples topped with a layer of melted sugar turned into brown caramel. But an idea struck her instantly: she covered the cake with the forgotten dough, put it back in the oven for a few minutes, and then flipped it onto a serving plate. The famous Tarte Tatin was born!
Well, the truth is the story is a little different. Among the many hunters who came to the region for the opening of the season was the restaurateur Louis Vaudable, owner of the famous Café Maxim’s in Paris. As someone connected to the restaurant world, he struck up a conversation with Stéphanie, the chef at the hotel where he was staying, and she told him about a traditional apple cake, typical of the Sologne region (south of the Loire River), that had been baked upside down for many generations.
It’s a nice story, and it helped spread the cake’s fame across France, but the truth is actually different (yes, truth has many faces).
Louis Vaudable did go hunting in the Sologne region in the early 20th century and stayed several nights at the Tatin sisters’ family hotel. As dessert during his stay at the hotel, he was served a slice of the delicious cake, and as a restaurateur, he asked for the recipe so he could add it to his famous establishment in the capital. He was politely refused.
Back in Paris, he sent one of his chefs to the small village on a mission: get hired at the hotel, spy on Stéphanie, the hotel’s chef, and come back with the secret recipe. The Parisian chef got hired as the hotel’s gardener, became friends with Stéphanie, and completed his mission successfully. Once back in Paris, the cake was added to the famous restaurant’s menu. To the owner’s credit, he preserved the sisters’ honor, and the cake was given the official name “Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin” (“the cake of the Tatin ladies”).
So, in the end, the cake most closely identified with Normandy actually comes from the Loire Valley region.
The Tatin hotel, in the village of Lamotte-Beuvron, is still open and operating today. You can take a look at its website through this link.
Thanks for All This Information About Normandy. So What’s Next?
That’s it, we’ve covered the historical and culinary background of Normandy. What’s next? Now that you’ve got the background you need, I invite you to check out the article 3 Walking Itineraries in Normandy and Places You Shouldn’t Miss, pick the route that suits you best, and start planning your trip.
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