Fagopyrum esculentum (common buckwheat); together with Fagopyrum tataricum (Tartary or bitter buckwheat), the cold- and altitude-hardy species of the high Himalaya and the southwest Chinese mountains
Origin: The mountains of southwestern China and the eastern Himalaya: common buckwheat (<em>Fagopyrum esculentum</em>) domesticated in the highlands of Yunnan and the Three Parallel Rivers country, and Tartary buckwheat (<em>Fagopyrum tataricum</em>) on the higher, colder ground of the eastern Tibetan plateau and the Himalaya
Buckwheat is the great impostor of the grain bin, for it is not a grain at all. The cereals of the world, wheat, barley, rice, maize, and the rest, are all grasses, members of the family Poaceae; buckwheat belongs instead to the Polygonaceae, the knotweed family, and its nearest kin in the kitchen are rhubarb and sorrel. What it produces is not a true grain but a small, hard, three-cornered fruit, an achene, whose floury inside is milled and cooked exactly as though it were a cereal. It is therefore a pseudocereal, like quinoa and amaranth, and like them it carries no gluten, a fact that has remade its fortunes in the present century.
The plant itself is a quick, undemanding annual, a sprawling thing of reddish stems and broad arrow-shaped leaves that throws up clouds of small white or pink flowers beloved of bees. Its virtues are the virtues of poor and difficult country. It races from sowing to harvest in ten or twelve weeks, faster than any cereal; it asks nothing of the soil and will crop on thin, acid, exhausted ground where wheat would fail; and it shoulders out weeds and needs no coaxing. These are the gifts of a mountain crop, and they explain why buckwheat became, again and again across the northern world, the grain of the highlands, the heath, and the hungry season, the thing that grew where nothing better would.
Two species matter at the table. Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), the sweeter and milder of the two, was taken into cultivation in the warm-temperate valleys of southwestern China and is the buckwheat of Japanese soba, Russian kasha, the Breton galette, and the American griddle cake. Tartary buckwheat (F. tataricum), darker, more bitter, and far hardier still, was domesticated separately on the high, cold ground of the eastern Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau margin, and it is the buckwheat of the roof of the world: the staple of the Yi people of the Liangshan mountains, of Bhutan, Nepal, and Ladakh, and the source of the rutin-rich bitter buckwheat tea now drunk across China and beyond.
Two further plants are sometimes counted, loosely, amongst the 'types' of buckwheat, though neither is a cultivated grain and neither is the ancestor of the two that are. Golden buckwheat (Fagopyrum dibotrys, syn. F. cymosum), the jinqiaomai of China, is a hardy perennial of the same south-western mountains, but it is grown chiefly as a medicinal plant, its rhizome long used in Chinese medicine, and eaten only marginally, as a leafy potherb in parts of south-western China and the Himalaya; it is a wild relative of the cultivated species, not their forebear. 'Wild buckwheat', meanwhile, is a name attached to several quite different plants: the weedy black bindweed (Fallopia convolvulus) of the same family, whose seeds were gathered in prehistoric Europe but are no longer eaten; the large and unrelated North American genus Eriogonum, the true 'wild buckwheats' of that continent; and, in the strict sense, the wild progenitors from which common and Tartary buckwheat were each separately raised. It is those two cultivated species alone that carry the culinary story that follows.
From its mountain cradle in southwestern China buckwheat travelled out along two quite different roads. The first ran east and north, the road of common buckwheat. It spread down into the loess highlands of northern China, where on the thin, dry soils of Shanxi and Shaanxi it became a noodle grain of the poor, pressed into the chewy strands of qiaomian héle. From China it passed into Korea, where as memil it became the cold-noodle and the buckwheat-jelly grain, and on to Japan, where buckwheat had grown since prehistory but only in the Edo period gave rise to soba-kiri, the cut noodle that became the soul food of old Tokyo.
The second road ran west, and it ran for thousands of miles across the grasslands of Inner Asia. Carried along the steppe corridor and quickened, by most accounts, by the movements of the Mongol age, buckwheat reached the lands of the Rus, where it found its truest second home. The East Slavs called it grechka, the Greek grain, after the Byzantine Greeks through whom they believed it had come, and made of its toasted groats the porridge, kasha, that is as close to a national dish as any grain has ever been to a people; from its dark flour they raised the blini of the pre-Lenten feast of Maslenitsa. Through the East Slavic lands buckwheat passed to Poland and the wider Ashkenazi world, where the toasted groat married the noodle as kasha varnishkes.
In the later Middle Ages buckwheat at last entered the rest of Europe, and Europe, baffled by a dark grain out of the east, named it for the heathen: blé sarrasin and grano saraceno, the corn of the Saracens. It took hold first on the poor sandy heathlands of the Low Countries and northern Germany, where the Dutch christened it boekweit, the beech-wheat, the name from which the English buckwheat descends. From that northern belt it spread to the acid soils of Brittany, the kingdom of the galette de blé noir; into Slovenia, where ajda became a matter of national feeling; and across the Alps to the Valtellina of Lombardy, the home of pizzoccheri and of polenta taragna. The Dutch then carried boekweit across the Atlantic to their colony of New Netherland, and the buckwheat cake, dark and sour and risen with yeast, became a fixture of the American winter breakfast from the Hudson Valley to the hills of Appalachia.
The high road of Tartary buckwheat kept to the mountains. It remained the bread grain of the eastern Himalaya and the Tibetan borderlands: the staple of the Yi of Liangshan, who eat it as cakes and brew it as tea, and of the Himalayan kingdoms, above all the Bumthang valleys of Bhutan, where buckwheat pancakes (khule) and buckwheat noodles (puta) are the everyday fare, and the fields of Nepal and Ladakh besides.
Buckwheat's modern geography is a map of the cold and the high. In Japan it is soba, one of the two great noodle traditions of the country and a marker of the seasons and the calendar alike: chilled zaru soba dipped in soy-and-dashi tsuyu in the heat of summer, steaming bowls in winter, and, on the last night of the year, the slithering strands of toshikoshi soba eaten to cut off the old year and pass into the new. In Korea the same grain is the cold noodle naengmyeon and the trembling grey jelly memilmuk. In northern China it is a highland noodle, and in the southwest mountains the bitter Tartary buckwheat is a true staple still, eaten as the buckwheat cakes of the Yi and drunk, increasingly across the whole country and abroad, as a fragrant, rutin-rich health tea.
Across the Slavic world buckwheat keeps a place no Western grain quite matches. Grechka, the toasted-groat porridge, is the everyday comfort food of Russia, Ukraine, and their neighbours, the side dish to a thousand meals and a grain so freighted with feeling that its sudden absence from the shops is read as a national alarm; the buckwheat blini of Maslenitsa carry the same weight of tradition. In the Ashkenazi kitchen the groats live on as kasha, and as kasha varnishkes. Western Europe keeps its regional strongholds: the savoury galette complète of Brittany, folded round ham, cheese, and an egg; the pizzoccheri and the buckwheat-and-maize polenta taragna of the Valtellina; the ajdovi žganci of Slovenia; and the Dutch and Flemish buckwheat pancake. In North America the buckwheat cake survives as a regional and heritage food of the north-eastern hills, celebrated each autumn at the buckwheat festivals of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
And everywhere, in the last two decades, buckwheat has been reborn. Naturally free of gluten, rich in the flavonoid rutin and in a uniquely complete plant protein, it has moved from the peasant table and the health-food shelf to the centre of the contemporary kitchen, milled for gluten-free baking, sprouted, toasted as a crunchy garnish, and prized once more as one of the oldest and most nourishing of the foods of the poor.
Historical Journey of Buckwheat
Yunnan and the Three Parallel Rivers, Southwest China — c. 4000 BCE
The homeland of common buckwheat lies in the warm-temperate mountain valleys of southwestern China, in Yunnan and the deeply folded country of the Three Parallel Rivers, where the wild ancestors of Fagopyrum esculentum still grow and where the plant was first taken into cultivation. It was an unlikely candidate for a staple. Buckwheat is no grass and no true cereal but a knotweed, a cousin of rhubarb and sorrel, whose floury, three-cornered seed merely behaves as though it were a grain. Yet its peculiar gifts made it precious in difficult country: it ripens in ten or twelve weeks, asks almost nothing of the soil, and will crop on thin, cold, acid mountain ground that defeats wheat and even barley. For the hill peoples of the southwest it was the grain of the high fields and the short season, ground for porridge and cakes and the chewy pressed noodles that the Chinese highlands would later perfect. From this cradle common buckwheat began its two great journeys: north and east into China proper, Korea, and Japan, and west, across the immense grasslands of Inner Asia, towards a second home amongst the Slavs that lay four thousand miles and several thousand years away.
The Eastern Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau Margin — c. 4000 BCE
On the higher and colder ground that rises from southwest China towards the roof of the world, a second buckwheat was domesticated quite separately: Tartary buckwheat, Fagopyrum tataricum, the bitter buckwheat. Where common buckwheat keeps to the temperate valleys, the Tartary kind is a true plant of altitude and hardship, able to set seed in the brief, frosty summers of the eastern Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau edge where almost no other crop will. Its seed is darker and its flour distinctly bitter, for it is loaded with the flavonoid rutin, the very compound that has since made it valuable as a health food; but to the mountain peoples bitterness was a small price for a grain that would grow at the edge of the snow. From these high, harsh fields Tartary buckwheat became the bread grain of the heights, never travelling far down into the lowlands where the sweeter common buckwheat ruled, but holding the mountains absolutely: the staple of the Yi people of the Liangshan ranges to the east, and of the Himalayan kingdoms and valleys to the west, from Bhutan and Nepal to Ladakh, where it remains to this day the everyday food of the high country.
Shanxi and the Loess Highlands, North China — c. 900 CE
Carried north out of its mountain cradle, common buckwheat found a second highland home on the dry, dust-blown loess plateaux of Shanxi and Shaanxi, where by the Tang and Song dynasties it was a well-established crop of the poor. The northern Chinese soils are thin and the winters hard, and buckwheat's speed and toughness made it a reliable second grain, sown after the wheat or on ground too exhausted for anything else. Here the Chinese genius for the noodle took hold of it. Buckwheat flour, having no gluten, will not stretch and pull like wheat dough, so the cooks of the north pressed it instead: a stiff buckwheat dough is forced through the perforated base of a heavy wooden or iron press, the héle床, directly into a cauldron of boiling water or broth, falling in long, round, chewy grey-brown strands. Qiaomian héle, the pressed buckwheat noodle, served in a hot bone broth or tossed with chilli, vinegar, and pickles, became and remains a defining everyday dish of the Shanxi and Shaanxi table, the most characteristic Chinese expression of common buckwheat as food.
The Liangshan Mountains, Sichuan (Yi homeland) — c. 1000 CE
In the high Liangshan ranges of southern Sichuan, the homeland of the Yi people, Tartary buckwheat is not a fallback grain but the very foundation of the cuisine. The Yi country rises steep and cold, too high and too poor for rice or much wheat, and on its terraced mountain fields kǔqiáo, bitter buckwheat, has been the staff of life for many centuries. It is ground and worked into dense, dark cakes, the kǔqiáo bāba, cooked on a griddle or in the embers and eaten with the Yi's salt-cured pork and sour soups, and it is the grain of festival and of everyday alike. In recent decades the Yi's bitter grain has found an unexpected second life far beyond the mountains: the roasted, golden-brown kernels are steeped as kǔqiáo chá, Tartary buckwheat tea, a fragrant, faintly bitter, deeply toasty infusion prized across China and increasingly abroad for the rutin and other flavonoids that the bitter buckwheat carries in abundance. What was the hard bread of a mountain people has become, in the cup, one of China's most fashionable health drinks.
The Bumthang Valleys, Central Bhutan — c. 1100 CE
West along the Himalaya, in the high central valleys of Bumthang in Bhutan, buckwheat is the everyday bread grain, grown where the altitude is too great and the season too short for rice. Both species are cultivated, the sweet common buckwheat and the hardy bitter kind, and from their dark flour the Bumthang kitchen makes its two defining staples. The first is khule, the buckwheat pancake: a thin batter ladled onto a hot griddle and cooked into a soft, nutty, grey-brown round, eaten with the fiery cheese-and-chilli stews that are the heart of Bhutanese cooking. The second is puta, the buckwheat noodle, extruded from a press in the same fashion as the noodles of highland China and tossed with mustard oil, egg, and seasonings. Across the wider Himalaya the same grain feeds the same kind of country: the phapar breads and pancakes of the Nepali hills and the buckwheat of Ladakh and Tibet all belong to this high, cold world where buckwheat, and very little else, will grow. In Bumthang it is more than food; the buckwheat fields are the measure of the valley's year.
Gangwon and the Korean Highlands — c. 1250 CE
Buckwheat passed from China into Korea, where the cool, mountainous interior, above all the high country of Gangwon, gave it ideal ground; the white-flowering buckwheat fields of Bongpyeong are so beloved that they are celebrated each autumn at a festival and immortalised in Yi Hyo-seok's classic short story 'When the Buckwheat Blooms'. As memil, buckwheat became one of the most distinctive grains of the Korean table. Its flour, slippery and tender, is made into noodles of a delicacy unknown to wheat: above all naengmyeon, the chilled buckwheat noodles served in an icy, tart broth or tossed with a fierce chilli dressing, a dish born in the cold north around Pyongyang and now eaten the length of the peninsula, especially in the heat of summer. The same flour sets into memilmuk, the trembling pale-grey buckwheat jelly that is sliced and dressed as a cool side dish, and is fried thin into the savoury buckwheat pancakes, memil-jeon and the rolled memil-buchimgae of Gangwon, wrapped around seasoned kimchi or vegetables. In Korea, buckwheat is the grain of the mountains made elegant.
The Eurasian Steppe (Central Asia) — c. 1240 CE
Buckwheat's long road west ran across the immense grass corridor of the Eurasian steppe, the highway along which crops, peoples, and empires had moved between China and Europe for millennia. A hardy, fast, undemanding crop suited to a short season and rough ground was well fitted to travel with the herders and cultivators of the inner Asian frontier, and most accounts hold that its westward spread was quickened by the great upheavals of the Mongol age in the thirteenth century, when the steppe was bound together as never before. Buckwheat was never the central staple of the steppe peoples themselves, whose lives turned on milk, meat, and millet, and so it passed through this vast middle ground rather than settling as its defining grain; but it was here, in transit across the grasslands, that the eastern crop was handed on towards the lands of the Rus and, beyond them, towards the heaths of northern Europe, where it would at last find its great western homes.
The Lands of the Rus (Kyiv and Moscow) — c. 1300 CE
It was amongst the East Slavs that buckwheat found its truest second home, and nowhere on earth is a grain so wholly woven into a people's sense of themselves. Arriving from the steppe in the medieval centuries, it was named grechka, the Greek grain, after the Byzantine Greeks through whom the Rus believed it had reached them, and it took at once to the cool, acid northern soils where wheat struggled. From its toasted, nutty groats the Slavs made kasha, the buckwheat porridge that became as near to a national dish as any grain has been to any people: grechnevaya kasha, the groats simmered until tender and enriched with butter, eaten morning, noon, and night, the comfort of the poor and the first solid food of the child and the convalescent. From its dark flour came the buckwheat blini, the small, soft, faintly sour yeasted pancakes whose round golden faces stood for the sun, heaped with soured cream, butter, herring, or caviar and eaten by the dozen at Maslenitsa, the riotous butter-week feast before the long fast of Lent. So deeply does grechka mean security and home that its disappearance from the shops, in lean or anxious times, has repeatedly set off waves of national panic-buying.
The Heathlands of the Low Countries — c. 1400 CE
When buckwheat finally entered the rest of Europe in the later Middle Ages, it took hold first on the poorest ground of all: the great sandy heathlands of the Low Countries and northern Germany, the thin, acid, infertile soils where the heather grew and where no proper cereal would thrive. On this ground buckwheat was a godsend, and the Dutch and the north Germans made it a heathland staple, burning and breaking the heath to sow it. It was the Dutch who gave the grain the name the English-speaking world still uses: boekweit, the 'beech-wheat', for the likeness of its hard little three-cornered seed to the nut of the beech, and the Germans called it Buchweizen and Heidekorn, heath-corn, to the same effect. From the dark flour the Low Countries made their daily buckwheat pancakes, the boekweitpannenkoeken, and the little puffed griddle cakes that became the poffertjes, set on the table with butter and syrup or with bacon and apple. This northern heathland belt became the springboard for buckwheat's last journeys: outward to the regional kitchens of western Europe, and across the Atlantic with Dutch settlers to the New World.
Poland and the Ashkenazi Pale — c. 1450 CE
Through the East Slavic lands buckwheat passed westward to Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, where the toasted groat, kasza gryczana, became a beloved staple of both the Polish and the Jewish kitchens of the region. The Polish name itself records the road by which the grain arrived: beside the everyday gryka, buckwheat is also called tatarka, the 'Tatar grain', a memory of its coming from the east in the wake of the Mongol and Tatar incursions, and not by the western, 'Saracen corn' route that carried it to the Low Countries and the Alps. Poland belongs, in other words, to the eastern kasha tradition of the steppe and the Rus, not to the heathland buckwheat of the Dutch and the Germans. In Poland it is cooked as a firm, nutty grain to set beside roasted meats and rich gravies, stirred into soups, and stuffed, with mushrooms and onions, into pierogi and dumplings. It was in the great Ashkenazi Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement, however, that buckwheat groats gained their most famous dish. Kasha, the toasted buckwheat of the shtetl kitchen, was married to the noodle to make kasha varnishkes: the groats coated in beaten egg and toasted dry until separate and fragrant, then steamed tender and tossed with deeply browned onions and bow-tie pasta, the varnishkes whose name recalls the little Ukrainian dumpling, the varenyky, that the pasta replaced. Carried across the Atlantic by Jewish emigrants, kasha varnishkes became one of the comfort foods of Jewish America, a dish in which the grain of the Slavic poor lives on far from the lands that first made it home.
Edo (Tokyo), Japan — c. 1600 CE
Buckwheat had grown in Japan since prehistory, its pollen recorded in the soil from the Jōmon period, and for most of that long history it was eaten in the simplest of forms, as soba-gaki, a hot dumpling of buckwheat flour stirred up with water. The transformation came in the Edo period, when the cut noodle, soba-kiri, was devised: the slippery, gluten-free buckwheat flour, bound with a little wheat flour and water, rolled thin and cut into fine strands. In the fast-growing city of Edo, the future Tokyo, soba became the great street food and fast food of the age, sold from stalls to the labourers and townsfolk of the world's largest city, and it has been a Japanese institution ever since. Soba is eaten chilled in summer, the strands piled on a bamboo zaru and dipped into a chilled soy-and-dashi tsuyu, and hot in winter in a steaming broth; and on the last night of the year, families everywhere eat toshikoshi soba, the 'year-crossing noodle', the long strand symbolising long life and its easy breaking the cutting away of the troubles of the old year. The Tokyo region remains the heartland of the soba tradition, and the noodle one of the defining foods of Japan.
Brittany, France — c. 1500 CE
From the northern heathland belt buckwheat spread west to Brittany, where the cool, damp climate and the poor, acid granite soils of the peninsula suited it as they suited almost no cereal, and where it became, as blé noir or sarrasin, the very grain of the Breton people. For centuries buckwheat was the staple of the Breton poor, who lived on it as porridge and, above all, as the galette: a thin pancake of buckwheat flour, water, and salt, spread across a great flat griddle, the billig, and cooked into a lacy, nutty, slate-grey round. The savoury galette became the foundation of the Breton meal, folded around whatever the house could afford, and in its most famous form, the galette complète, around ham, grated cheese, and an egg cooked sunny in the centre, the four corners of the pancake turned up to frame it. Eaten with a bowl of dry Breton cider and followed, by tradition, by a sweet wheat-flour crêpe, the galette is the dish that Brittany has given to the whole of France and far beyond, the most celebrated of all the savoury uses of buckwheat in the West.
Slovenia and the Eastern Alps — c. 1520 CE
In Slovenia buckwheat, ajda, became a matter of national feeling, one of the foods through which Slovenes have long recognised themselves. Established as a field crop in the Slovenian lands from the later Middle Ages, often sown as a quick second harvest after the grain was cut, it suited the cool Alpine valleys and the modest holdings of the peasantry and sank deep into the everyday diet. Its most beloved form is ajdovi žganci, buckwheat 'spoonbread' or mush: coarse buckwheat flour or groats cooked in salted water into a stiff porridge, then broken up with a wooden spoon into rough, tender lumps and finished with hot lard and its cracklings, or with milk, or with mushroom sauce. Filling, frugal, and profoundly homely, žganci was the daily bread of the Slovenian countryside, eaten for breakfast, supper, and the labourer's field meal, and it remains a cherished comfort food and a point of national pride. Buckwheat runs through the rest of the Slovenian table besides, in the festive layered štruklji and the buckwheat bread and dumplings of the mountain kitchen.
The Valtellina, Lombardy, Northern Italy — c. 1550 CE
Buckwheat crossed the Alps and came down into the Valtellina, the long Alpine valley of upper Lombardy, where it arrived in the sixteenth century and found in the cold, steep, stony ground a place to flourish; the Italians named it grano saraceno, the Saracen corn, for its dark and foreign character. The Valtellina made buckwheat the heart of a small but glorious mountain cuisine. From its grey flour, mixed with a little wheat, come pizzoccheri, the short, flat, dark ribbons of buckwheat pasta boiled together with shredded Savoy cabbage and sliced potato, then layered with the valley's own mountain cheeses, Valtellina Casera and Bitto, and drenched in butter sizzled with garlic and sage: one of the great peasant dishes of the Italian Alps, rich, earthy, and unforgettable. From the same flour, cooked together with maize meal, comes polenta taragna, the dark, soft, buttery buckwheat-and-corn polenta, stirred with mountain cheese and named for the long stick, the tarèl, with which it is beaten. In the Valtellina, as in Brittany and Slovenia, buckwheat is the grain that turned the poverty of a cold and difficult country into a cuisine all its own.
The North-eastern United States (New Netherland and Appalachia) — c. 1650 CE
Buckwheat crossed the Atlantic with the Dutch, who planted their boekweit in the colony of New Netherland along the Hudson, and with the German settlers of Pennsylvania, who knew it as Buchweizen; from these beginnings it became a fixture of the rural American north-east. On the cool, poor hill soils of New York, Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian uplands of West Virginia it grew where wheat would not, and from its dark flour Americans made the buckwheat cake, the dish that for two centuries was the great winter breakfast of the region. Distinctively, the American buckwheat cake was raised not with quick chemical leavening but with a yeast batter kept and replenished from day to day through the cold months, fermenting overnight to give the cakes their characteristic light, sour, tangy lift; griddled dark and tender and stacked with butter and maple syrup or sorghum molasses, they fuelled the farm worker through the winter. As wheat grew cheap the buckwheat cake faded into a regional and heritage food, but it is far from gone: the autumn buckwheat festivals of Kingwood in West Virginia and of the Pennsylvania hills still serve the cakes by the thousand, keeping alive the memory of the grain that once fed the American winter.
