Home › Recipes › Old Fashioned Buckwheat Cakes
Old Fashioned Buckwheat Cakes
(Continuous Stock) Dissolve one half of a compressed yeast cake or a dry yeast cake in one quart of lukewarm water, and pour into an earthen jar; add sufficient buckwheat flour to make a medium soft batter. Cover up and set away in a warm place over night. Next morning take out as much as you wish to use for breakfast, into another dish or bowl. Thin this down with sufficient lukewarm water, in which you dissolve half teaspoonful of The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda for every cup of stock and a water you use. Also add a pinch of salt and one teapoonful molasses to every cupful of batter, which makes them brown nicer. If you have any of the batter left after breakfast, pour it back into the original stock left in the jar from the night before. The next night you add more lukewarm water and more buckwheat so as to keep the batter going, and, if taken care of properly, you can keep this stock of buckwheat going nearly all winter, without any more yeast. Always have buckwheat sifted. Never put any salt into batter until you are ready to bake the cakes in the morning and put it only in the batter you took out of the crock.
The first night you should keep the crock in a warm place, but after that, you can keep it in a cooler place. You may add a teaspoonful of white flour every third or fourth night, not oftener. This is the original old time way and makes the best cakes. 2 cups Flour,
This is a sourdough-style starter method rather than a fixed formula: the jar of fermented buckwheat batter is the "continuous stock," and only the portion drawn off each morning is seasoned and baked. A few points make it work in a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: soda at the griddle, not in the jarThe baking soda neutralizes the acid built up overnight and gives the lift, and it begins working as soon as it is wet, so stir it into the drawn-off portion just before baking, exactly as the text directs. Note that the recipe nonetheless has you return any leftover seasoned batter to the jar, so a little soda reaching the stock was evidently not thought to be a problem.
- Salt likewise stays out of the stockSalt slows yeast and, over a winter of feeding, would gradually weaken the culture. Season only the morning's bowl, as the text says.
- Yeast quantitiesA compressed yeast cake was about 0.6 oz; half of one is roughly 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast, or a scant 3/4 teaspoon instant. This is only for the first night, and any excess simply speeds the initial ferment.
- Vessel"Earthen jar" and "crock" mean the same thing here: a wide unglazed or glazed stoneware crock, loosely covered so gas escapes. A glass or food-grade plastic container with the lid resting on works identically. Avoid bare aluminum or cast iron, which the acid attacks.
- Keeping the stock nowA warm room the first night, then a "cooler place" -- in period terms an unheated pantry or cellar rather than a measured temperature. In a modern heated house, refrigerate the crock between uses and let it come to room temperature before drawing off batter, or it will sour more sharply than intended.
- Griddle heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Buckwheat batter is thin and the molasses encourages fast browning, so work on a moderately hot, lightly greased griddle rather than a very hot one; the cakes should set through as the surface loses its shine.
- The teaspoon of white flourBuckwheat has no gluten, so an occasional spoon of wheat flour may give the batter a little body. The recipe does not say why it limits the addition to every third or fourth night; one plausible reading is to keep the stock predominantly buckwheat.
- YieldNo yield is stated. As a rough guide, a quart of thinned batter would make somewhere around sixteen to twenty four-inch cakes, with the remainder returned to the crock.
- The stray last lineThe trailing "2 cups Flour" belongs to no step in this method; it is a fragment carried over in the original printing and should be ignored.
Buckwheat cakes were the standard cold-weather breakfast across the northern United States and Canada well into the twentieth century, and the "continuous stock" described here is the older technique: a perpetual leaven kept on the pantry shelf from the first frost until spring, fed nightly like a bread starter. Buckwheat itself is not a grain but the seed of Fagopyrum, a fast-growing plant that thrived on the thin, acid soils of New England and the Pennsylvania and New York uplands, which is why it stayed a regional staple long after wheat flour became cheap. The recipe appears in an Arm & Hammer booklet because the method depends on soda: an overnight ferment produces lactic and acetic acid, and the alkali both neutralizes that sourness and reacts with it to raise the cakes. The appeal to the "original old time way" was already, by the time of this printing, an argument against the quick-batter and baking-powder recipes then displacing it.