Farmers and farmers’ wives, truck drivers and their families, weekend soccer clubs — everybody piled into that little place on the corner, in that little town where even the fog smelled of manure. They sat, without formality, at bare tables, on rough rattan chairs, and ate these gorgeous, tasty galettes at any hour of the day. Before church. After school. The bank teller came for his lunch break.
I just don’t know why we do this to certain things: How did the utilitarian, sturdy, totally accessible crepe come to be thought of as a tuxedo-and-white-glove kind of meal? And how did we come to think of it as something intimidating to make? It’s a pancake, after all. A freakin’ pancake (pardon my French). That said, in fact, the first few never, ever work out. If you don’t tilt and swirl fast enough, you’re left with a half moon in the pan, or if your batter is too thick, you end up with a spongy disc. Straight out of the gate your confidence is rattled, it’s true. But know that it’s this way for all of us — even for Michel or Jean-Claude, who cranked out perfect galettes all day and all night otherwise and used to christen his griddles every morning with his first few disasters, scraping the duds with his long metal spatula right into the trash bucket at his feet, with a little flourish of the wrist and one hard clank on the griddle top to ceremoniously ring its death.
You’ll always lose a few in the first couple of rounds. Throw them out. Too thick, too thin, lopsided — it takes several swirls and ladlesful to get the motion and timing down. Batter thickens up? Add a little water, a splash of beer, a glug of hard cider. It’s not precious. Once you’ve hit your stride and the galette starts to set up, you immediately crack your egg and lay in the ham and add the grated Gruyère. By the time the egg is cooked, the cheese will have melted, the ham will have warmed through and the crepe itself will have a crisp exterior that tastes dark and nutty as the buckwheat toasts in the dry pan.
A hard cider, pulled from the cellar, neither fridge-cold nor kitchen-warm, is the thing to drink. And this earthy galette, with its rich and fatty toppings, deserves a superb one in spite of its humble ingredients and lack of pretension. Seek out a true Norman hard cider in a bottle from your wine store, not a can of oversweet, soda-pop-ish “spiked” apple drink that you now find in any supermarket aisle — dumbed down and passed off as “hard cider.” That’s another way, though in the opposite direction, that we confuse things that shouldn’t be confused.