Cookies!

Close your eyes.  Imagine coming into a warm room, like those old-fashioned kitchens with a wood-burning stove.  Maman has just pulled out a cookie sheet with a dozen cookies all lined up, smelling of melted butter, cinnamon and vanilla.  The aroma permeates every corner of the house, and you smelled the goodness half a block away when rushing home from school.  Your mouth is watering and you reach for a warm cookie.  It melts in your mouth and you reach for another...

Play on words: Gourmandie instead of Normandie.

There's a cookie factory and shop in Lonlay l'Abbaye called "Biscuiterie de l'Abbaye".  No pictures allowed while touring the factory.  We had to remove all our jewelry and wear a very fashionable paper coat and a "charlotte" paper hat.  Our group of nine traipsed through the factory looking at every stage of production, from where the batter is mixed to how different rollers are used for each cookie design, to all those thousands of cookies going down the assembly lines.  There were three lines of cookies being made at any one time, and once they went through the ovens, they were cooled and assembled and packaged.  What a production! 

Throughout the process, we were wrapped and saturated with this wonderful cookie dough aroma as well as the scent of freshly baked cookies.  I would have wanted to stay there forever!  But oh, the temptation of reaching onto the assembly belt for a cookie...

Cookies being shipped throughout France and internationally as well.  Some are made under a store's label, to their specifications, like Super U or Carrefour, some of the French grocery chains.

We are bringing some "souvenirs" home, unless we eat them on the way...  You never know when you might need a snack during the night!  "Biscuiterie de l'Abbaye" is stamped on the apron which I use to catch all the crumbs.

Thought of the day:  During Karl's second career in computer automation, he visited many big plants to ensure that Rockwell Software was working as promised.  Big factories that made cars, beer or milk products worked round the clock with only a few employees to ensure there were no stoppages, and used automation to do all the work.  This cookie factory uses technology from the 50's, using minimal automation to employ 220 people.  There is an extra crew of "temporary workers" on the week-end shift during the summer, filling special orders.  If profit took precedence over employment and the CEO brought in automation, this little town would lose an important source of work and income for over 200 families.  I think the grand-son of the factory's founder still believes in the old-fashioned vision of his ancestor, to make good cookies from that original recipe and to hire lots of local workers.  Bless his heart!