The seed of the buck-wheat is said to be excellent for horses, the flowers for bees, and the plant green for soiling cows, cattle, sheep, or swine. No grain seems so eagerly eaten by poultry, or makes them lay eggs so soon or so abundantly. The flour is fine and white, but from a deficiency in gluten does not make good fermented bread; it serves well, however, for pastry and cakes, and in Germany and Holland is extensively used, especially by the farmers, dressed in a variety of ways, among others as pancakes, which if eaten hot are light and pleasant, but become very heavy as they cool. A hasty pudding made of the flour with water or milk, and eaten with butter and sugar, is considered a favourite dainty.]
FOOTNOTES
[1287] It cannot however be denied that some indigenous grasses might be brought by culture, perhaps, to produce mealy seeds that could be used as food. It is at any rate certain that some grasses, for example, the slender-spiked cock’s-foot panic-grass, Panicum sanguinale, which we have rooted out from many of our gardens, was once cultivated as corn, and is still sown in some places, but has been abandoned for more beneficial kinds.
[1288] “If the learned would lay aside disputing, and give place to truth, they would be convinced, both by the sight and the taste, that this plant (buck-wheat) is the ocimum of the ancients.”—Kreuterbuch, Augsburg, 1546, fol. p. 248.
[1289] Theophrast. l. vii. c. 3.
[1290] Dioscor. l. ii. c. 171.
[1291] Geopon. l. ix. c. 28.
[1292] Varro, lib. i. cap. 31. That a kind of meslin is here to be understood, has been supposed by Stephanus, in his Prædium Rusticum, p. 493; and Matthiolus is of the same opinion. See Matthioli Opera, p. 408. Buck-wheat may have been employed green as fodder; and it is indeed often sown for that use; but there are many other plants which can be employed for the like purpose.
[1293] Dioscorid. l. ii. c. 188.
[1294] Theophrast. p. 941.