Etranger

On a holiday in Brittany too many decades ago, we found ourselves in a sort of country fair, or community lunch. I remember arrays of pétanque courts where many noisy, boistrous contests proceeded in parallel. Also a local band playing a traditional instrument - something a bit like a saxophone, but sounding more like a broken kazoo. The insistent, endlessly repetative melody was such an earworm that it sometimes still comes back to me

But the main event was conducted in an open courtyard in which huge trestle tables were laid out. Around three sides of this enormous dining room were many small booths in each of which four or five women of multiple generations, set up specialist griddles for cooking the thin local pancakes - what are now fashionable in UK and sold a 'crêpes'. There was a system of buying tickets from a central point and spending them at your chosen booth - I remember the locals handing over wads of tickets and returning to the table with precarious pancake towers on a single sharing-plate

We rapidly learned that savoury pancakes were called 'galettes' - 'crêpes' was reserved for sweet ones. More than that, galettes were brown - as if made from wholemeal flour - while crêpes were closer to our English idea of a pancake. In broken French, I discovered that galettes were made from blé noir - black wheat - but that left me none the wiser. Much later, I discovered that the real translation is 'buckwheat', grown there primarily for this purpose. Buckwheat is not wheat, or indeed a cereal. It is in the knotweed family and produces a small black seed that nevertheless yields a flour 

I've never seen buckwheat growing in England, but it is now another entry on the growing list of plants grown not as food but because they might offer some benefit for pollinators or soil condition, moisture retention or weed control. Buckwheat is promoted as ticking all these boxes, and here it is, growing in combination with phacelia, possibly accessing soil phosphates that other plants cannot extract, then returning them in a more available form when it is killed by the first frost. I know it produces a dark, pungent honey that a friend once brought back from a trip to Europe - a tase I would describe as 'interesting'!