Cornmeal Buckwheat Flour Chestnut Flour and Chickpea Flour

Because wheat and bread are now universally available throughout France, it’s hard to imagine that they were once luxuries and that until the middle of the twentieth century there were regions in France whose inhabitants had never tasted wheat bread. In poorer regions, cooks did their best to make edible foods out of starchy products like buckwheat, chestnuts, chickpeas, and later, after the discovery of the New World, corn and potatoes. But wheat has one characteristic that distinguishes it from these other cereals and starches. It contains gluten, a collection of proteins that give bread dough the elasticity that in turn traps the carbon dioxide produced by yeasts so the dough rises. In short, wheat breads rise while “breads” made from other starches do not. In areas where wheat was nonexistent or in short supply, these other starches were ground into flours and used to make polenta-like porridges, to be eaten like gruel or allowed to solidify and then grilled or sautéed, much as polenta is today. (Italian polenta was made with chestnuts before corn was brought back from America.) These porridges were also thinned with liquid and cooked into pancakes, like the Niçoise chickpea pancakes called socca and the crêpe-like galettes from Brittany, made with buckwheat flour. In some regions, these alternative flours were sweetened and leavened with beaten eggs—whole eggs to make cakes, separated eggs to make “soufflés.” Breads were and still are made by combining these other flours with wheat flour, no doubt originally to get by with using less wheat flour, but now simply because many of these breads have a marvelous flavor and texture.