“With enough butter, anything is good,” quipped Julia Child. Today’s food lovers are just as smitten—and so is our writer, who set out on a quest across France to find the holy grail.
From Nouvelle Aquitaine to Normandy to Brittany, France is renowned for its butter. Find out where to go for a taste of the best.
By Mary Winston Nicklin
Published January 27, 2026
On a cold winter day in Normandy, not far from the D-Day landing beaches where Allied soldiers liberated France in World War II, the air is redolent with cream in the Isigny Sainte-Mère butter factory. Master butter maker Norbert Constant peers into the stainless-steel churn. “It’s a wave of butter!” he says, smearing a spatula with the rich product (82 percent butterfat). And then we taste solidified sunshine.
Butter is more than a kitchen staple, or bread’s inseparable sidekick. Central to culinary tradition, this golden ingredient is a thread in the narrative of human civilization, dating to the earliest domestication of animals 10,000 years ago. Language itself is slathered in butter idioms. “To butter someone up” connotes flattery in English, while the bounty of French expressions connects butter to money, commerce, and prosperity.