When the end of March comes round, Auvergnats with kitchen gardens look forward to eating grelons (also known as tanous or méquettes), the unopened flowering heads of cabbage, kale or turnip. And rightly so. Their delicacy of flavour took me by surprise when I first ate them. Perhaps I should not have been all that surprised: broccoli - ‘little shoots’ in Italian — is simply a more developed form of the same thing. I had gone to buy some eggs from Louise Aymar (who gave