by Ann Mah
What was wrong with me?
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I would never have understood Brittany’s true crêpe culture if I hadn’t met Louise.
Louise Gesten is a proud Bretonne with short gray hair, a sturdy figure, and arms made strong from administering hugs and beating crêpe batter. I met her on my second day in Quimper, introduced by Hervé Floch’lay, a local cooking professor who was a friend of Sophie’s and one of the many contacts on her list.
Louise was born in 1934, which doesn’t seem that long ago, and yet she can easily recall a time when crêpes were made on a wood-burning stove. Her grandmother had an enormous billig—that’s the Breton word for the round, flat griddle used for cooking crêpes—heated with bits of white-hot coal collected from the fireplace. Many Breton homes had a special stove for making crêpes, which was usually found outside the house in a small shed.
When Louise was a little girl living on her grandparents’ farm, Fridays were known as le jour de crêpe, she told me. “Every family had a special day to eat crêpes. It was usually Friday, because that was a jour maigre”—a thin day, a fasting day—“and we didn’t eat meat.”
Preparing the crêpes took the better part of the day. Louise’s grandmother used to start at nine in the morning, mixing the batter by hand—she actually stuck her hand into the bowl of ingredients and beat everything together—and she didn’t finish frying the last crêpe until three o’clock. “There were so many of us she had to serve the meal in two batches,” Louise said. “Eight children, plus the farmhands. . . .” They ate so many crêpes that after the heavy lunch everyone would pull out blankets, curl up on the floor, and take a nap.
“But how did you eat the crêpes?” I pressed Louise for details.
“Plain,” she said.
“Plain, with cheese?”
“Non, nature. Plain, with a little salted butter. Or sometimes graisse salée”—a highly seasoned preserved pork fat local to the region. “It was less expensive than butter.”
The idea of a crêpe stuffed to bursting with different fillings was so ingrained in my culinary sensibility that at first I had a little trouble accepting the idea of a plain one. “What about a crêpe complète?” I asked, citing the version popular in restaurants across France: egg, ham, and cheese.
“Oh, I make that for my grandchildren,” Louise said. “But honestly, Bretons like to taste the crêpe—not the filling.” I thought back to my lunch at the Quimper crêperie the day before, when I’d scraped out the rich bacon and cheese filling and eaten just the thin pancake. Perhaps a Breton spirit had been guiding me.
“And to accompany the crêpes,” Louise continued, “we drank bowls of lait ribot or gros lait.”
I knew that lait ribot was buttermilk, the thin liquid left over in the butter churn. But what was gros lait, which translates literally to “fat milk”?
“C’est une spécialité bretonne, un vrai délice!” Louise assured me.
Later I discovered that gros lait was halfway between yogurt and fromage frais, tangy, thick, and creamy. In fact, it was probably what I’d seen my neighbor eating at the crêperie, a traditional accompaniment to crêpes in Brittany yet almost unknown outside the region.
Louise still uses her grandmother’s recipe to make crêpes, combining buckwheat and white flour for the savory version, because it makes the batter more delicate. “Crêpes from Finistère are crisp and light,” she told me. “In the north they’re called galettes because they’re made only with buckwheat flour. They’re heavier—costaud.” She frowned a little.
Sweet crêpes in both the north and south are made solely with white flour, which Louise called beau blé—beautiful wheat. She serves them for dessert brushed with melted butter and perhaps a sprinkle of sugar.
“Not caramel au beurre salé?” I asked.
“What’s that?” she said.
Before I left her house, Louise disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a stack of crêpes pulled from the freezer. “Take these home with you,” she insisted. They were perfect, a mottled golden color, as thin as tissue paper.
“Oh, I can’t,” I protested. Even with today’s modern conveniences, I was sure it took a lot of effort and energy to make crêpes. After all, Louise had just finished describing how she beat the batter with her hand for at least ten minutes, to “bring it to life.”
But she insisted, finding a plastic bag to wrap them in and pressing them into my hands. “I have more!” she assured me. “I always have more. If I don’t have any in my frigo, I crave them.”
Her need for crêpes reminded me of my Chinese mother, who can’t go more than a day without a bowl of rice, or my Italian friend Gianfranco, who requires regular infusions of pasta, or even Didier, who once told me that he missed cheese so much on a trip to South Africa that he ate an entire wheel of Camembert on the airplane home. Crêpes, I realized, were a Breton’s comfort food.
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“You can’t make a good crêpe without butter,” Sophie had said. “It provides the flavor.” Her words spurred me on as I tried to hunt down a local dairy farm, driving in circles through endless stretches of green pastures, making U-turns again and again and again, obeying the GPS as it repeated itself tonelessly: “Faites demi-tour. Faites demi-tour.” But with no real address to punch into it, I had no real directions to follow. When I called, all I could hear was the sound of mooing cows.
I was trying to find the Ferme de Kerheü, an organic, family-run farm near Quimper. Valérie Guillermou, the dairy farmer’s wife and butter maven, had offered to explain the secrets of her special cultured butter. But like so many locations in rural France, the farm had no actual address, just a name and a nearby village, Briec. I flagged down a passing car and asked if there was a farm nearby. One farm? There were several. I spelled out the name, and the guy gave me directions, repeating them three times. When I finally found Valérie, she greeted me with warmth even though I was more than an hour late. Inside her stone farmhouse, we sat at the dining table while she explained beurre de baratte: Breton butter.
It begins, she told me, with cream, which is fermented so it’s thick and slightly tangy. It is beaten in the butter churn, not an old-fashioned, hand-cranked wooden apparatus but a modern industrial machine with a deep metal basin and lethal blades that whip the fat out of the liquid “until it forms grains.” She then drains the thin liquid and washes the butter, dousing it with water at least three times. “The trick to good butter is to rinse it really well,” she said. “The residue of babeurre”—buttermilk—“is what makes it turn rancid.”
After the rinsing comes the malaxage, or kneading, which works the butter grains by machine into a smooth mass, and then the salting—a generous sprinkling of coarse, gray sel de Guérande, which is collected on Brittany’s coast.
“Breton butter is always salted,” Valérie told me. “In the past, salt wasn’t taxed, so they used a lot of it to preserve food.”
It’s the combination of this flaky, mineraly salt and tangy, soured cream that makes Breton butter so desirable and delicious, with its soft texture and faint flavor of toasted hazelnuts.
The butter-making process takes about two hours from start to finish, from buckets of soured cream to molded sticks. Valérie, along with her husband, Stéphane, and their team of five employees produce about 140 pounds of the stuff a day, along with yogurt, raw milk, gros lait, and lait ribot—products that are sold at supermarkets in Finistère.
Before we said good-bye, I asked Valérie about her crêpe-eating memories. “I’m Canadian,” she said. Her accent, which I had assumed was Breton, was actually Quebecois. “I immigrated to France ten years ago.” But because she married into a Breton family, crêpes were woven into the fabric of her domestic life. “Le jour des crêpes is like an institution. Friday is for crêpes. Saturday you eat the week’s leftovers. And
Sunday you make a whole new meal for the family to eat until Friday.”
“Do you have a favorite recipe?” I asked.
Silly question. Valérie and her family—like many of the people I met in Finistère—used to own a crêperie. She had perfected the professional crêpe maker’s smooth, assured twist of the wrist while practicing over a billig, with a three-liter tub of batter by her side. “They say there are as many recipes for crêpes in Bretagne as there are people who make them,” she said before rattling hers off by heart.
Indeed, everyone I met in Brittany had a crêpe recipe to share. Each formula was unique—some added milk, others an egg, a drizzle of honey, or a spoonful of sugar—but each used the same basic formula of buckwheat flour, liquid, and salt. And every person recited her recipe from memory, like a favorite poem or a prayer.
People who love food tend to speak a common language, easily exchanging ideas and culinary traditions. But what touched me most in Brittany was the generosity I encountered, the willingness to share personal memories and family recipes, down to the minutest detail. I spent one morning in Brittany at Hervé Floch’lay’s house swapping cooking techniques, learning about kouign-amann, a buttery Breton cake, and telling him about my father’s pork-and-cabbage dumplings.
Hervé is Breton de souche—from the stump—born in Finistère with Celtic roots that stretch back generations. He is a cooking professor at a local vocational school in Quimper, and in his spare time he gardens and raises chickens, makes his own cider with his own apples, and collects honey from his own beehive. His house, bright with oversize windows, is part of a small outcropping of buildings above the village of Briec, and he had invited me there to meet his family and eat homemade crêpes. On the day of my visit, he had a fire burning in the living room and a crêpe-making station set up in the kitchen, with a billig, deep bowls of savory and sweet batter, and a rozelle, the slender, T-shaped tool used to spread the mixture on the searing surface of the griddle.
I sat at the kitchen table while Hervé made crêpes, confidently swirling the pale batter over the black billig, allowing the batter to brown, and then turning it with a sharp flip. “What would you like in it?” he asked.
“Just butter.”
Hervé stabbed a hunk of yellow butter with a fork, slid it around the hot surface of the crêpe, which he then maneuvered to a plate. It looked like dark, shining lace, a contrast of deep brown buckwheat against clean white porcelain. I cut into it and the edges shattered under the pressure of my knife, crisp bits softening to a toothsome chew, the melted butter offset by a wholesome buckwheat tang. It was a classic crêpe, a perfect marriage of crunch and tenderness. I devoured it in two minutes, and when I was done, Hervé was at the ready with his ladle and rozelle and wooden spatula to make me another. This time I asked for graisse salée. I had never knowingly enjoyed pure animal fat, but this was different: savory with onions and salt, studded with cracked black pepper, the lard melted into the crêpe, giving it a porky richness brightened by the relief of spicy bursts. By this time Hervé had made his own crêpe with graisse salée, and we ate them together, savoring each bite in appreciative silence.
We cleansed our palates with a few leaves of green salad, and Hervé told me crêpe tales of yore. As a little girl, his wife used to walk to the village crêperie bearing her own pats of butter on a plate—one for each of the pancakes she would eat. And Hervé still remembers the unique payment system at his boyhood crêperie: Before serving, the owner would pinch a corner from each of the crêpes consumed, then tally them up at the end of the meal to calculate the bill.
Hervé smeared only melted butter on his dessert crêpes, but they didn’t need anything else. The contrast of sweet dough and salted butter, of brittle and spongy, was a study in textures and flavors, decadent simplicity. But what about the famous sauce au caramel au beurre salé? Whenever I’d mentioned Brittany and crêpes to friends in Paris, they’d breathed the words “salted butter caramel” before slumping into a swoon. Yet no one in Finistère seemed to know what I was talking about. As Hervé and I swiped the last vestiges of butter from our plates, I finally uncovered the story.
“When I was a kid, there was no sauce au caramel au beurre salé,” he said. “We had caramels—individually wrapped sweets—but not a sauce for crêpes.”
“So it was something created for . . .” I could scarcely bring myself to utter the word.
“Tourists? Ouais.” Hervé nodded. “People have the impression they’re eating something classically Breton. But the truth is, fifteen years ago it didn’t even exist. That doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he added, seeing the shocked expression on my face. “It’s not traditional. But it tastes good, it’s easy to prepare ahead of service. Personally, I really like sauce au caramel au beurre salé.”
Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed.
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During my spring visit to Brittany, I kept looking for buckwheat fields. I asked Louise if she remembered them from her Breton childhood, and she described endless acres of white flowers with red stems and an exquisite perfume. However, as I drove around the Quimper countryside on my final afternoon in Brittany, I didn’t see a single leaf of the plant. Why? I asked Youenn Le Gall—a local farmer and owner of the buckwheat-producing Ferme de Kerveguen—and he guffawed. “C’est une plante d’été,” he said.
“A summer plant? C’est-à-dire . . .”
“You sow it in mid-June and reap in September. It only takes a hundred days,” he explained patiently. “It grows very, very fast. Faster than weeds.”
Buckwheat is a plant native to East Asia. It came to Western Europe in the twelfth century (some sources say later), traveling in the food sacks and saddlebags of soldiers fighting in the Crusades. In fact, the French word for buckwheat—sarrasin—is the same one used during the Middle Ages to refer to Muslims; doubtless there was a racially tinged connection between blé noir—the darker flour made from sarrasin—and the darker-skinned immigrants who imported it.
With a resistant, fast-growing nature and its ability to thrive in anemic soil, buckwheat long ago earned a reputation as a food of the poor. “When the earth is poor, so are the people,” Youenn said. But as commercial transport increased and white flour became more available, the dark and heavy blé noir eventually lost favor. In the 1960s, when the French government decided to make Brittany a dairy-producing region, the focus of local farmers switched to cows and buckwheat production decreased dramatically. By the 1990s local crêperies found themselves importing Brittany’s traditional staple from Canada. That’s when some Breton farmers formed a cooperative and started growing it again.
In recent years nutritionists have touted buckwheat as a miracle food, full of amino acids and other beneficial compounds. But Bretons have long known the nutritional benefits of this hardy plant. After all, over five hundred years ago it saved them from famine.
During the fifteenth century, Duchess Anne of Bretagne first planted crops of buckwheat in the region. A Breton noblewoman, Anne loved her native country with a fierce loyalty, so deeply that—despite marriage to two kings of France—she fought to maintain its independence as a duchy. Part of this independence was self-sustenance, and as a wise and prescient ruler she encouraged the cultivation of buckwheat, recognizing it as a nutritious plant that grew quickly and easily in the area’s poor soil. Thus buckwheat spread throughout the region, and Anne established herself as a beloved ruler. After her death she became the patron saint of Brittany.
For three centuries buckwheat continued to flourish in Brittany. “Wheat was taxed,” Youenn said. “But not blé noir.” This explained, in part, its wide appeal.
“But why use it to make crêpes?” I asked. “Why not bread?”
He regarded me with a bemused air. “You can’t make bread from sarrasin. There’s no gluten in it. The dough is too heavy. It won’t rise.”
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p; “Well, what about . . . ?” My mind raced over the cooking options. Aside from bread, it was difficult to think of another really satisfying, hearty, nutritious food that could be made from flour. “Can you make porridge?”
“In the north of Finistère, they make kig ha farz,” he acknowledged. “It’s a kind of stew. They stuff a piece of cloth with buckwheat dough and boil it with the meat so that it absorbs all the fat.” I could tell from the way he described it—with a little moue of distaste—that he did not consider kig ha farz to be a dish worthy of exploration.
“So that leaves . . . crêpes.”
“Oui.”
“Because people had nothing to eat but sarrasin. And the only way to eat sarrasin is as a crêpe.”
“Oui.”
Later, driving back to my bed-and-breakfast in the gray drizzle of a spring afternoon, I considered the paradox: One of France’s most beloved dishes—a food that had come to symbolize the country around the world—had begun as a product of penury and survival, of sustenance. It was the story of the world’s staple foods, from corn to oats to rice—out of hardship had come innovation, and out of innovation had come enduring bounty.
It sounded, actually, like a pretty good philosophy for life.
Galettes de Blé Noir
Of all the crêpes I ate in Brittany—and there were many—Hervé Floch’lay’s remain my favorite. He offered me his recipe in exchange for one of mine (for Chinese dumplings), and though I tried to faithfully replicate his, I found the pure buckwheat-flour batter frustratingly difficult to handle. Without any gluten, the crêpes were stodgy and thick; they broke easily and stuck to the pan. Through trial and error, I discovered that a fifty-fifty mix of buckwheat and white flours creates a silky batter that produces delicate crêpes with crisp edges. (Buckwheat flour, by the way, is available at health-food stores, produced by special mills like Bob’s Red Mill, which also offers mail order nationwide.) I like to eat galettes plain with a little salted butter, but filled crêpes are a beloved, inexpensive meal in France, especially the complète: cheese, ham, and an oeuf miroir, or sunny-side-up egg.