A Jammy Cow in Normandy

We took the girls on their first foreign holiday this weekend, with a Friday to Monday visit to Normandy, France. I spent 3 weeks of every summer holiday from the year I was born until I was 15 on the continent in a tent visiting beaches and famous landmarks but it had been 22 years since I last went to France.

When people go on a foreign holiday they adopt one of two attitudes towards food. Some like to seek out familiar foods and try to eat as close to home-cuisine as possible. Others embrace the opportunity to try something new and lap up the culture by eating the native food. I am very much in the second of these groups and really wanted to enjoy something a bit different. With 22 years of holidaying in the UK, it has been very hard to experience anything out of the ordinary when it comes to food. No matter where you go in the UK you can always find a Tesco supermarket and a McDonalds. You can, of course, find the odd local items if you try - some local jam maybe or some freshly landed seafood - but on the whole we have turned our entire country into an homogeneous market. Even some of things that are marketed as local souvenirs are made in a factory and distributed nationally or, worse still, are imported but just have local packaging. Sigh.

It was therefore refreshing to enter a different country with a completely different attitude towards food and shopping. Normandy in particular is proud of its cows and associated dairy-products and we were in the Calvados area around Caen. Now, I remember from when I was kid that there are huge hypermarkets in France. They used to be Mammoth when I was child and sold so much more than just food at a time when supermarkets in this country were in town, small and just sold food and household essentials. But this time we managed to travel hundreds of miles and only saw two large supermarkets. Instead, the food shopping we did was in the high street.

In a time when the British high street seems on the verge of collapse, the French high street is still very much alive. I laughed when I realised that my school French lessons about the bolongerie, boucherie, passterie etc. was actually what it is like in France. You really can walk down any French high street and shop in all these little shops, one next to the other. That is, unless you happen to be in the high street at lunchtime when all the shops will be shut. Yes, shut for lunch! And forget shopping on Sundays - shut again. Oddly, the small convenience stores open from 7am until 9am only on a Sunday - presumably so you can buy your baguettes and pain au chocolat for breakfast. And then the bolongeries open again late Sunday evening for a couple of hours so people can stock up again on bakery products - presumably to enjoy some cheese and/or pate with slices of baguette with their wine after dinner. Yes, the whole shopping culture in France seems to revolve around food. Good for them, I say!

On our trip we popped into a local market and some of these classic little shops and dredged up our school French, added a smattering of hand gestures and a bit of Fronglaise and successfully bought local food with very little trouble. Normandy strawberries, Normandy cheese, Normandy butter, French jam, Houlgate pate, Port Salut cheese, Calvados cider and freshly baked baguette and croissants. It was a delight to enjoy these local foods but quite honestly, it would have been positively difficult to buy anything that wasn't at least French, if not made within Normandy. For this I think the French should be admired.

So this morning, having arrived back from France late last night, my girls ate French croissants with Jammy Cow jam for breakfast and Steve went to work with a French rosette (salami) and Jammy Cow chutney sandwich. Hmmm... an odd mix of "local" foods but perhaps appropriate in this day an age when it is possible to travel hundreds of miles in a few hours.