“My menu is here,” Nicole Rivaux lifts a wooden shoe nailed to the wall of her restaurant, under which a plastic sheet is stuck.
In this creperie in Pontivy, in the center of Brittany, we discover that the food is divided into two columns.
On the left, the “crepes” are listed.
And to the right?
The “crepes” too.
Only one thing sets them apart: flour.
For sweet versions, it is made from wheat, while for savory versions, it is made from buckwheat, the other name for buckwheat.
“There are no pancakes because here, people don't say 'galette'.
They say ‘buckwheat pancakes’,” comments Nicole Rivaux.
This nuance doesn't seem like anything but "it's the war between the partisans of the crepe and those of the galette", slips mischievously the restaurateur, at the head of her business since 1970. Moreover, at the table , a duo of “lunchmakers” tear each other apart.
“I say pancake because I’m from Rennes,” says a lady with white hair.
“And I say crepe because I come from Finistère!
», replies the person accompanying him.
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Next to it, another duo seems to agree: “We are from here and we say “crêpe”.
But we live in Rennes and Ille-et-Vilaine, it's ''cake''.
We can't make them understand that they are wrong.
» To make her recipe, Nicole Rivaux mixes buckwheat flour but also a little wheat ("otherwise the dough sticks"), coarse salt and a lot of water ("otherwise, we won't be able to not good at spreading it") and, with three strokes of rozell on her century-old cast iron crepe pans, she turns the dough which solidifies into a sort of lace.
When she lifts it to show us its finesse, we see the light from the window passing through!
“Only the name changes depending on where you are.
The pancake and the crepe are the same thing,” explains Nicole Rivaux.
But in reality, not exactly!
To understand what really distinguishes these two products, we interviewed a historian who devoted a thesis to buckwheat, Alain-Gilles Chaussat, and organized a blind tasting with a Parisian chef crazy about buckwheat, Manon Fleury, at the head of Datil.
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