For the 2010 festive season, when Isigny Sainte-Mère launched its Camembert with Truffles, regional paper Ouest-France interviewed director general Daniel Delahaye. He remembers truffles being added to Camemberts by the Paris crèmiers for years: “They’d cut the cheese in two and slip in some truffle pieces, so why didn’t we do that?” he told journalists.

After quite a few trial runs, the cooperative developed a 150g Camembert with truffles: buyers in France and Japan were bowled over by the results and “…the orders started rolling in for Christmas,” beamed deputy director general Luc Lesénécal. The cooperative ordered 400 kilos of truffle and made a limited run of 100,000 small Camemberts, retailing at between seven and nine euros. “We repeated last year’s success with truffles, when we a limited run of truffles in butter and Isigny creme fraiche” Luc explained. “You take a simple plate of fresh pasta, put some truffled crème fraîche on them: you’ll be talking about nothing else for a while!”

For now, the production run is short when compared to Isigny Sainte-Mère’s total output of 12 million. “Using truffles builds our image of high quality products,” Daniel Delahaye added. “We have already successfully created a classic combination of Camembert and Calvados, which now sells a million cheeses a year.” So are truffles going to enjoy the spirited success of Calvados? Sud-Ouest seemed to think it was a possibility.

At the end of every year, it is common to see oyster sellers outside the entrances to French supermarket entrances. Everywhere you look, there will be tables piled high with France’s favourite seasonal seafood: marquees filled with boxes of oysters of all sizes destined for new year celebrations.

Depending on the region, the sellers will often be oyster producers, especially on the west coast, which is better known for the size and scale of its oyster production. Even the French are not always aware that Normandy is a significant producer of oysters in its own right, since the region is immediately linked to butter, cream and dairy products in the public mind.

But travel down the coastline and you will see the signs of this activity for yourself. A region that can market 7,000 tonnes of oysters in a year can hardly keep this coastal production secret from the world.

Cross the Seine on the Pont de Normandie, taking a moment to enjoy the vertiginous views from the high suspension bridge, before heading west towards Caen and the Cotentin peninsula. The Veys bay (baie des Veys) marks the point at which the coastline turns north towards Cherbourg. Low tide here reveals a shifting maze of channels between banks of mud and sand.

With no fewer than four rivers draining into the bay, including the Vire, it should come as no surprise that another of Isigny’s claims to fame should be some very special local oysters, otherwise known as the huître spéciale d’Isigny. Just as the rivers irrigate the lush pastures of the saltmarsh and the hinterland, so they bring additional nutrients to the estuary.

Nor should it come as any surprise to learn that the traditional local accompaniment for Isigny oysters is Isigny butter. Try it some time, even if the oysters don’t come from Isigny or the shoreline of the Veys bay.

Not impossible, but a sufficient challenge to ensure it remained the prerogative of rich households. Where available, a buttery or a creamery were once built on the north side of a farmhouse, to avoid direct sunlight.

Larders, for the same reason, work best when sited on a north-facing wall. Marble shelves or slabs of slate ensured that food could be kept as cool as prevailing conditions allowed. A porous ceramic vessel filled with water will cool by evaporation and can keep butter fresher for longer.

But travelling with butter before the age of steam was generally avoided between about Easter and the onset of winter. It was just too hot for butter to survive the journey, with the exception of the canned clarified butter that was shipped to Brazil on vessels that returned laden with coffee.

Historically, Isigny sur Mer had the twin advantages of being able to send butter by ship and consolidate consignments from upstream producers on the river network that converged on the Vire estuary. Add to that the relative ease of navigating in wintry weather and it rapidly becomes clear why the ports of Paris, Rouen and Le Havre used to be such busy centres for the butter trade.

The cheese grader’s skill is to be able to predict how the characteristics of a cheese will develop in the coming six months to a year. One of France’s finest cheese graders is Roland Barthelemy, who describes himself as a “cheese sommelier” and runs the Fromagerie Barthelemy in rue de Grenelle, Paris.

As well as supplying cheese to the Elysée presidential palace, one of Roland’s many claims to fame is his extended ripening of Isigny Sainte-Mère’s Mimolette cheeses.Whereas a standard mature Mimolette would be a year old or maybe more, in the hands of the prévôt of the French cheesemakers’ guild, these hand picked balls of cheese reach the ripe old age of two years and even improve with the keeping.

Nor do you have to wait until you next dine at the Elysée to sample Barthelemy’s cheeses. The Fromagerie Barthélémy is at 51, rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement. You can even visit the ‘cheese somellier’ online.

Birmingham has been an export destination for Normandy dairy products since the days when steam power first started supplying the UK’s urban centres with food in the nineteenth century. This particular trip had a competitive edge, however.

The Isigny team came away with no fewer than seven medals, which is no mean feat. Indirectly, they were up against about 3,000 cheeses grouped up into more than 600 classes for the different panels to assess.

Over the past 15 years, Isigny Sainte-Mère has won more than 200 medals in competitions around the world. The cooperative’s head office has one wall of its stairwell covered with its most recent awards.

Look out for WCA medal winners in your local cheese shop: there is room for diversity in world class products. Here are the Isigny medal winners:

Isigny Sainte-Mère came away with seven medals in the 2010 World Cheese Awards

Festive topping for Christmas pud...

For any English shoppers who can still reach a local Waitrose supermarket despite the snow, the Isigny Sainte-Mère Crème Fraîche with Calvados that featured in the previous post is available from the shelf. It may just be quicker than waiting for a  home delivery van in the present snowy weather….

For the adventurous, it should arrive at table swathed in the blue flames of burning alcohol: it takes a surprisingly modest ladle half-full of spirits to get a spectacular ceiling scorcher. Once the “oohs” and “aahs” start to subside with the guttering flames, it is time to review the final serving options.

Traditional English trimmings for this classic include brandy or rum butter on an extinguished pudding. Custard is safe, but lacks interest: time to look for the alternatives. Most creams in the UK are too bland to have any impact, but for those who can get hold of Isigny Sainte-Mère’s Crème Fraîche with Calvados, it is the answer to a maiden’s prayers.

This smooth crème fraîche brings a tangy, note of fruit that floats above the silky sensation, before it melts away into the hot pudding. The Calvados lifts the flavours of the dried fruit, with a little edge in the cream, too.

For those celebrating Christmas in France, there is no problem in finding the cream: just remember to take a Christmas pudding with you, since there may not be a lot to choose from in French supermarkets. In the UK, it is a harder undertaking to find the cream. However, for those in the south of England, you can even have it delivered to your door by the Ocado home shopping delivery vans. It’s good enough to want Christmas more than once a year.

Andy Sheppard (l.) with chef Ivan Vautier

Andy Sheppard was playing live tonight with guitarist John Parricelli on the BBC’s classical music channel Radio 3. He also spoke to presenter Petroc Trelawny about his forthcoming appearances at the London Jazz Festival.

On Saturday afternoon, he is appearing alongside Isigny Sainte-Mère chef Ivan Vautier in a re-run of their cooking treble act with percussionist Michel Rabbia juggling the sounds as well as the drums.

Andy feels the need to travel to Europe every six weeks, because of the food and the culture. As well as admitting to a consuming passion for oysters and good cooking, Andy talked about the time he spent at Le Pressoir in Caen, watching Ivan at work.

“He’s very zen,” Andy observed. As well as recording cattle for the Gregorian chant in Jazz et Cuisine, you will hear chickens and it sounds as though he gets a gag out of the onions, too.

There is still time to book tickets for the gig and the Andy Sheppard interview is spread out over half an hour after the six o’ clock news in this BBC iPlayer streaming audio that is available until November 18. Enjoy.

The menu starts with a capuccino of woodland mushrooms and Isigny camembert cheese, whizzed up in a blender and foamed through a siphon. Horn of plenty fungi start life on the woodland floor in late autumn, but you will only see the very tops of these black two-inch fungi poking through leaf litter. They are tricky to spot in the wild, but they are good enough to make a guest appearance on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall!

Pan-fried foie gras with green asparagus is next on the menu, served with a crunchy hard-boiled egg (listen out for the hens…) and raspberry butter.

Seafood with a pinch of seasoning...

Next up is lobster with a thin onion tart, decorated with crispy bacon pieces and onion sorbet.

Another egg, this time a slow-cooked yolk, appears atop a round galette made with slices of Andouille sausage, a speciality of the Vire river basin.

Finally, a simple dessert of caramel strawberries.Well, it’s not exactly simple, but it’s the least elaborate dish on the concert menu.

So if you want to see live virtuoso cooking to the haunting strains of Andy Sheppard’s saxophone alongside  Michele Rabbia’s distinctive percussion and sound effects. Enjoy.

Isigny Sainte-Mère chef Ivan Vautier will be appearing in the London Jazz Festival on November 13 to repeat the set he did with Andy Sheppard at Coutances last year. Accompanied by percussionist Michel Rabbia, and saxophonist Andy Sheppard at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Ivan will be cooking live again in Jazz et Cuisine.

TV cameras will put up images on to a screen behind the stage, so that festivalgoers will get to see everything happening on the work top. There will be plenty to see, too, since Ivan is pushing out the boat. If you want to see how to put a Camembert through a soda syphon, keep your eyes peeled: there are unlikely to encores, still less seconds.

Listen out for the hens when Ivan picks up the eggs, too! If you hear any Gregorian chant, listen closely to the basso rumblings, too. These are not monks, but four-legged milk producers in a Normandy field. Normandy cattle markings are said to include ‘spectacles’ around their eyes, but the cows don’t need them to read music when Andy Sheppard’s out with his microphone..!

There’s no need to worry about having to make difficult choices in the festival programme, either, this is an afternoon gig, so there will still be time to go on to an evening concert afterwards. More details of Jazz et Cuisine are here..