Gillian Grassie

(belated) Normandy

// September 20th, 2009 // Travel

In the month of August, the Parisians who can generally clear out of Paris and leave the city for the hordes of tourists who descend during vacation season. Because of this shift in population, the kitsch factor of the town goes way up and the ratio of decent, local live music to awful cover bands singing Oasis songs for drunken Expats gets completely skewed. I’d been planning to spend August traveling and learning about the music outside of Paris, so after an incredible ten days at the la Festival Interceltique de Lorient in Brittany, I was only too happy to accept a serendipitous invitation to play a house concert and follow-up on some new contacts in Normandy.

Through the graces of some dear friends, I was able to stay at the most unbelievably gorgeous farmhouse in Carentan, a small village not far from the coast. This place was the real deal. The ivy that covered the entire front façade was so old that the vines were as thick as my forearm and the glossy leaves bigger than my hand. Beyond the garden was an old boulangerie, a tiny building with an enormous wood oven for baking bread. Wild blackberries lined the sides of the single-lane roads running through the marshes and cow pastures, and there were hazelnuts and an old fig tree growing in the yard.

On the last evening I was there, we gathered an obscene number of blackberries and made a delicious crumble with them and the hazelnuts we’d painstakingly gathered, shelled, roasted, and chopped. (Okay, so I wasn’t really involved in the actual gathering and shelling of the nuts. But I watched and later I ate the crumble and it was truly fantastic).

Also among the culinary adventures that week was the day we found a rusted, old-school rotisserie. We bought two chickens, stuffed their skin with rosemary, garlic, and shallots, and roasted them in front of an open fire in the den. About three to four hours later, we ate two gorgeous birds with a mushroom cream sauce.

Every other evening, we would take this adorable tin milk pail with a wooden handle and walk to a nearby dairy farm to get our fresh milk, and when I say fresh I mean warm-from-the-cow, unpasteurized, full-cream deliciousness. When we came back, we’d pour the milk into a big glass bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight, skimming off the thick cream that had risen to the top with a large spoon in the morning and shaking it vigorously in old jam jars to make butter. Seriously.

One day I got to talking with the very nice dairy farmer and he let us go into the small barn and watch the milking process. After a little more chatting he even let me stick my finger in one of those milking machine suction valves to see what it felt like (gentle), which is way more than we got to do on my third grade class field trip.

I confess to being irrationally excited by the milk pail and to wearing pigtails and skipping almost every time we did the dairy run (I’m REALLY sorry I don’t have a picture of this, don’t know how we missed it). My enthusiasm for the quaint factor was, however, a bit muted by a severe bout of indigestion that lasted for a week after I returned to Paris. I didn’t really think I’d have to break into the supplies of ciproflaxen and immodium until I got to India, but I guess the cows who made that delicious, unpasteurized milk didn’t want me to forget them when I left.

Even with the upset tummy, the trip to Normandy was a total treat. Sometimes when I’m in the city, squashed in the Metro at rush hour, I think about those long evening walks around the marshes, looking for cows amenable to the idea of koe knufflen. I hope I can visit again someday. Maybe next time I’ll run into David Sedaris.

(For more pictures, check out the photo gallery on my flickr account)