I have been downsizing my collection of recipe books. I had over 100. Some have gone to a school here in Reims that has a catering department. One I kept, was the Cranks recipe book. A ‘crank’ is a crazy person, or as the Oxford English Dictionary says, ‘a person who has strange ideas or unusual ideas and beliefs’. There used to be a Cranks restaurant in Norwich, which I had visited several times. Vegetarian meals were served there, way before vegetarians were considered normal. Flours used were usually wholemeal and ingredients were unusual like lentils, soya and buckwheat.

Years later, I had symptoms of gluten intolerance and cut out all wheat products. Looking back it was an easier journey than it could have been thanks to recipe books like ‘Cranks’ that introduced alternatives to the plain white, non-organic flour on which, the UK Flour Millers estimates, a third of our food products are based.

I had heard about buckwheat from the Cranks book but it was in Brittany that we were astonished by fields of a bright red cereal. We stopped to investigate and identified it as buckwheat that is ground to make sarrasin flour in France and turned into delicious savoury pancakes or galettes. Interestingly, buckwheat is a relative of rhubarb – so they say!

Another cereal that we drool over is maize-meal or polenta. We make the most delicious chips from polenta stirred into an organic chicken stock. It needs lots of stirring and gets thicker and thicker, before the final ingredient of grated parmesan cheese is added. The gloop is spread out in a large tray to cool and dry, then cut into chips to be fried. We had an Italian pilgrim stay with us who said our polenta was the best he had ever tasted – praise indeed!

Oats! Where would we be without porridge, muesli and granola. Cranks had a recipe for granola that was baked in the oven until crisp. I have often made it. Samuel Johnson in his dictionary defined oats as, “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”. We wouldn’t be without flapjacks, and cheesy savoury ones are also made in our house – great for eating on motorway journeys.

I’ve just seen that millet was another grain used in several recipes. It is the grain that is fed to budgerigars – a sprig is often hung in their cage. After trying it once, I don’t think I will return to those recipes- it was bland and tasteless.

I often bake cakes and biscuits for Afternoon Tea when we have pilgrims arriving to stay overnight while walking to Rome or Spain. When people taste my baking they often ask for the recipe. I have to tell them that I can give them the recipe, but what they make will not taste like the item that have just eaten. My box of flours rarely has white plain flour in it. At the moment it has toasted soya, rice flour, potato flour and sarrasin.

If the recipe says sugar, I might add raw cane, muscovado or date syrup with a bit of molasses for a depth of flavour. And of course all brown sugars have chromium in them – the mineral that is necessary for the digestion of sugar – but that is another story.