Pancakes Against Pollution, the Apocalypse, What Have You

You could serve this with a glass of wine. You could tell yourself it’s terroir, it’s tradition, it’s French.
But it’s also a survival strategy — a pancake for toxic soil.

TL;DR:

This isn’t just comfort food — it’s cadmium-aware cuisine (perhaps a new marketing campaign?). Traditional buckwheat galettes, rooted in Breton soils, dodge the heavy metal accumulation that haunts modern wheat and leafy greens. Resilient and low-uptake — the kind of grain we may need more of.

Pseudo

This dish nods to Brittany — land of acidic soils, rain-soaked clay, and traditional buckwheat, yet a crop that doesn’t accumulate cadmium the way modern wheat does.

Its just what the plant does: it sequesters heavy metals in the parts we don’t eat rather than concentrating them in the seeds as wheat does.

It’s peasant food. It’s resilient. I think they’re delicious. You just have to lean into the nuttier, earthier flavor.

It’s a pseudocereal, like amaranth & quinoa. Cereals are grasses and have similar of dealing with minerals.

Leafy greens, grains, and root vegetables are some of the worst offenders when it comes to cadmium uptake. Spinach, lettuce, carrots, wheat — all sponges in contaminated or acidic soils. They don’t filter. They absorb. And then pass it along.

Buckwheat, though, isolated it and stores heavy metals away from the seeds. Maybe it’s a side effect of the way it treats nutrients in general: it doesn’t need much.

Why Buckwheat?

• It’s not a true grain, and it’s naturally low in heavy metal uptake.
• It thrives in poor, acidic soils (like much of northern France), making it both a historic staple and a future-friendly crop.

Ingredients

For the galette batter:

• 1½ cups buckwheat flour
• 2 cups cold water
• 1 egg
• ½ tsp salt

Filling:

• 4 eggs (1 per galette)
• 4 handfuls of spinach or chard (steamed or sautéed)
• Grated cheese (Comté, Emmental, or goat)
• Butter or neutral oil for the pan
• Optional: crème fraîche or a touch of mustard

Directions

1. Make the batter: Whisk buckwheat flour, water, egg, and salt until smooth. Let it rest 1 hour (or overnight in the fridge).
2. Prep the fillings: Wash and steam or sauté the spinach. Grate your cheese. Set aside.
3. Cook the galettes: Heat a nonstick or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Butter it lightly. Pour a ladle of batter and swirl to coat the pan thinly. This is pretty hard, actually. Those people who make them all day long just make it look easy.
4. Assemble: When the bottom is set, add spinach and cheese to the center. Crack an egg over it. Cover the pan for 2–3 minutes to cook the egg.
5. Fold: Gently fold in the edges to make a square, leaving the yolk exposed. Slide onto a plate. Serve hot. Again, every step of this takes a delicate hand. All of mine look terrible, if they survive the process intact at all.

So…

Lazy (& unskilled) Buckwheat Pancakes

I have torn up and broken galettes every time. This is much easier.

It’s also good to make them smaller, like the size of a saucer, 5” or so, Americans.

• 1 cup buckwheat flour
• 1 cup milk (or water)
• 1 egg
• Pinch of salt
• Optional: knob of butter or oil

Whisk it all together. Let it rest 10 minutes (if you’ve got time). Fry like a regular pancake — small, thick, …rustic?

Serve with something salty or sweet. It is flexible and forgiving

Got a family dish grown from poor soil? A food with a weird history? Drop it in the comments — or send a message. I’d love to feature it.

edible remediation?

Buckwheat accumulates a lot less cadmium in its edible parts compared to wheat. Buckwheat can tolerate cadmium in soil, but it isolates it mostly in the roots and doesn’t transfer it to the grain. But wheat does.

Wheat drinks cadmium up and transfers it to right to the grain: wheat can accumulate 10–50 times more cadmium in grains than buckwheat grown under similar conditions.

They eat a lot of wheat in France.

a musical chelator*

Buckwheat Sings — Eddie Murphy (1981)

@tpmancino#saturdaynightlive #eddiemurphy #buckwheat #wookinpanub #snl @Eddie Murphy

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Blé noir

Buckwheat — the plant — is a peasant staple. Grows fast, grows poor. Doesn’t suck up cadmium like modern wheat. But its name? That’s where things get tangled. In English, buckwheat also became the name of a Black child character in Our Gang, later spoofed (brilliantly, uncomfortably) by Eddie Murphy on SNL. The parody caught on — so much so more people in the US may know “Buckwheat” more for singing garbled pop songs than food.

In France, the same grain is called sarrasin. Which literally means “Saracen” — a medieval slur for Muslims, pagans, anyone from the East. French peasants didn’t just eat buckwheat; they named it after the people they feared and fought in the Crusades probably because the grain is, sigh, darker…?

Sadly, that is probably it.

It’s a grain, yes — but also a projection.

I prefer blé noir (black wheat), which you see in most stores now.

*Chelator — a substance that binds metals. Buckwheat traps cadmium in its roots, keeping it out of the part we eat.