Here's additional information about traditional buckwheat-based foods around the planet.
Acadia
In Southern Maine, we see bits of culinary evidence here and there that Franco-Americans have been here. The occasional restaurant menu offers poutine. The Cookie Jar, a doughnut shop down the road from my house, sells delicious, deep-fried crullers that feel like they weigh about a quarter-pound each.
Once one hops in the car and begins driving up toward the Canadian border, though, Acadian culture is everywhere. ("Cajun" came from the word "Arcadian.")
The farther toward the border one goes, the more a visitor to Morthern Maine experiences pockets of tradition, especially up at the very crown of Maine, where this piece of the U.S. is enfolded within the Canadian province of New Brunswick: Frencophone radio, fiddle and squeezebox music, busy French-Canadian people logging, fishing, hunting, telling stories, and making food.
Ah, yes, Acadian food. When it comes to the specific subject of buckwheat pancakes, a mix of French-speaking cultures is blended to create this specialty dish, in all its varied forms.
Centuries ago, a Celtic people called the Bretons lived in the southwestern part of the UK, near Wales and Cornwall.
During a time of political turmoil, the Breton people evaded persecution by migrating to France.
The area of France where the Bretons settled was then given the name Brittany because so many Breton-language speakers gathered there.
Different groups arrived at different times and settled in tribal groups.
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| http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-bretons-cultures-of-the-world.html |
Today, English-speakers like me call it Brittany. The French call it Bretagne. The people who live there may use the traiditonal name Breizh.
From Brittany, some of these people migrated again, this time over the ocean to the eastern maritime areas of Canada. Breton people settled in Newfoundland, in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Other emigrants came to northernmost Maine directly, or drifted down from Canada over time to settle in towns like Frenchville, Van Buren, Fort Kent and Madawaska.
Madewaska is both the name of the "panhandle' area of New Brunswick and the name of a town at the border between Maine and Canada. Madewaska is well-known for the silverhull buckwheat grown exclusively in the area.
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| The pin marks the location of Madewaska, Maine. |
In the area where Maine and Nova Scotia come together, traditional pancakes called "ployes" are made from silverhull (also called silverskin) buckwheat. The griddle cakes are bubbly and much lighter in color than traditonal buckwheat pancakes.
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| Ployes on the left, traditional buckwheat flapjacks on the right. |
Ployes are such a regional favorite that the special flour for making them can be bought by the bag.
Correct flour is essential to making good ployes, but it helps to know how the specialty dish is made. A friendly Canadian, who learned to make ployes from her mother, demostrates how it's done in this YouTube video.
In Fort Kent, Maine, there's an annual Ploye Festival, which explains why this young person is dressed as a buckwheat pancake.
He'll have to stand back while the year's largest ploye is made.
Back in the Bretons' second home of Brittany, there's a kind of thin buckwheat crepe called a galette sarracin (or gallette de sarrasin). Over time, the popularity of the galette has spread from Brittany into larger French culture. This crepe usually served as a savory dish, and it's richer than a ploye, both in the culinary sense and in the sense that it uses more costly ingredients including milk, eggs, and/or sugar.
The "sarracin" crepe (in French, the word means both buckwheat and Saracen, an Arab in medieval Europe), is often cooked on a round crepe griddle and formed with a T-bar wooden paddle that looks like a miniature garden tool, is thinner than a ploye.
The griddle for making galettes, which is called a bilic (or bilig), used to be made of cast iron, because that metal could withstand high heat. These days the crepe griddles are usually electric with a temperature dial on the side. A narrow baker's spatula or a wide-bladed kitchen knife is used for rolling or flipping the edges of the buckwheat galette.
YouTube has this video of someone using a bilic (bilig).
Here is a short article about street vendors who expertly cook galettes, one at a time, on griddles set up along the sidewalks of Paris.
Though the griddle is round, the finished crepe takes a different shape. Sometimes it's a rectangle after it's been rolled around the food like a burrito or a wrap.
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| http://aladyinfrance.com/buckwheat-galettes/ |
Sometimes the galette is a square with the edges turned up to hold an egg, like the French version of "toad in the hole," as seen in this blog about types of French flour.
Here's a how-to article about making the square galette.
If you buy ready-made galette mix, you can make your crepes into octagons or animal shapes or whatever geometric arrangement makes you happy.
If you don't happen to have a bilic, here's an instructional video showing someone making galettes in a crepe pan with a handle, on the burner of a regular kitchen stove.
Italy
The buckwheat pancake, whether ploye or galette, comes from the France/Brittany/Acadia connection's nice cultural mix. There's a similar nationality overlap when we come to another food: buckwheat pasta. These particular noodles are a different product than soba noodles. (See the Japanese traditions page for more info on soba.) This other type of buckwheat noodle originates from Western Europe, at a time when a Germanic tribe called the Lombards moved back and forth over national borders which weren't the same as they are today.
Lombardy is a region in northern Italy, with a famous lakeside city called Como.
Before settling in Italy, Lombard people moved through France, Germany, Italy, and closer to Scandinavia, creating political change, battles, and a traditional of tasty food made from buckwheat.
Seems like a wild mix of climes at first -- but think about the Alps and how close European countries' borders are to one another and it all makes more sense. Add to that the influence of migrating people. We've seen how the Celtic influence of the Bretons moved through the UK to France to Canade to New England. The earliest Celtic Bretons also did some intermixing with Scandinavian culture via the Vikings, who lived up where winters are long and temperatures are cold and the ground is inhospitable . In the land of ice and snow (cue Jack Black singing Led Zeppelin in "School of Rock"), buckwheat was a valuable crop.
So there was already buckwheat flour being made into dough by all kinds of mountain-dwelling people. and then the Italians of the Lombardy region rolled it out and cut it into narrow strips and boiled those, and we got buckwheat pasta. All ready to serve with a glass of French table wine. Talk about globalization, huh?
Here's a bit more of the Scandinavian influence when it comes to buckwheat. A 2012 article in The Guardian offers a nice recipe for Norwegian buckwheat pancakes.
Pennsylvania Dutch Country
Did you know that scrapple, the tasty porridge made with bits of scrap beef, pork sausage, and/or bacon, is made with buckwheat? This cookbook has information about that.
Here's a how-to on making scrapple at home, with a recipe which includes a cup of buckwheat flour. The cook who posted this promises she can keep your scrapple from getting mushy. That's good because scrapple is supposed to be firm in texture, holding together so well that it can be sliced. (And fried, in case all those bacon drippings aren't enough fat for you.)
Presented now, for your listening enjoyment, is a gratuitous "Scrapple from the Apple" music video.
The Middle East
Tabouleh is popular in Lebanon, in Israel, in Syria, and other countries. Here's a version which uses buckwheat in place of bulgur wheat.
Germany
The image above is from a website called Spoonfuls of Germany, which has an associated cookbook. In the cookbook and on the site, you can find a recipe for delish-looking buckwheat cake.The recipe features lingonberry filling, which you might be able to find in the global food aisle or a specialty store. If not, I'm confident that another preserve made from colorful berries would do.
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Southern India
In India's southern areas, including Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, buckwheat (kuttu) becomes a special food for the festival casually called Vrat. Vrat is short for Varalakshmi Vrat, and it's a celebration of the goddess Lakshmi.
During the yearly event, women fast and then prepare a special buckwheat roti (flatbread) to help bless their homes with happiness and harmony. The festival takes place just before the full moon in the lunar month of Shraven (July-August). This handy online article gives the basics about Vrat.
There are a number of recipes for Vrat roti pancakes online. This one looks good. Buckwheat flatbread is delicious no matter when one eats it. This recipe for puffed buckwheat bread is focused less on the festival aspect and more on healthy eating.
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Poland, Ukraine, Russia
It might be hard to compete with the Japanese consumption of buckwheat products, because soba noodles are a lunchtime favorite for so many people, but in terms of actual buckwheat groats, Russians eat more of them than anyone in the world, followed closely by Ukrainians.
The largest gross consumption of kasha per capita in the world is in Russi9a, with 15 kg (33 pounds) per year, followed by Ukraine, with 12 kg (26 pounds). One-fifth of all the cereal grain (and pseudograin) in the Russian diet is buckwheat.
For a visual on typical Russian carb-loading: check out this video of a typical Russian breakfast, in which a bowl of cooked buckwheat is served in the way Americans eat oatmeal.
And this Wordpress blog urges us all to imitate the Russian enthusiasm for buckwheat.
This website gives some anecdotal evidence of 20th century Russian attachment to groats: "Russian buckwheat Buckwheat was so important to Russians that an early Russian Olympic team, when they found they couldn't get grechnevaya kasha in Paris, packed up and went home." It's a great story. I wasn't able to confirm it online, but the last Olympics were last held in Paris in 1924, so we may never know.
Here's the type of Russian gretchka that the Olympic athletes were homesick over. Apparently fluffing is the key.
Another favorite Russian buckwheat recipe is the blini. This recipe includes smoked salmon(and sour cream, of course!)
I missed the 2010 news story about a buckwheat shortage in Russia which was a true crisis.
On a happier note, Russia (and the Slavic countries) celebrates a Pancake Holiday every year, which is awesome, isn;t it? Here's a recipe for buckwheat mini flapjacks someone made to celebrate.
Ukraine
We learned earlier than "grechka" means "buckwheat," so it won't surprise you to hear that Ukrainian "grechanyky" are little meatloaf burgers with buckwheat in them. Here's a video on to make them at home.
And here's a video featuring Ukrainian opposition politicians throwing handfuls of backwheat during a parliamentary sessions.
Poland
Poland also does its part for buckwheat cuisine.
This lively chef demonstrates how to cook Kasza Gryczana (Polish kasha) with soy protein nuggets and some red onion.
On the Buckwheat Kitchen Garden page on Jewish dishes containing buckwheat, attention is given to the knish. Poles have a version of the buckwheat-potato knish and that's the recipe in this cooking video. It's n Polish but there are subtitles, and the opening folk music is charming.
Sources:
Photo of ployes fromhttps://www.eater.com/2016/10/31/13439280/ployes-maine-french-acadian-tradition
Buckwheat pancakes photo: http://fakeginger.com/buckwheat-pancakes/
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