Home › Breakfast › Buckwheat Cakes
Buckwheat Cakes
For an ordinary sized family, take a four quart jar and half fill it with buckwheat; then add two tablespoonfuls of Indian meal, and one teacup of Graham flour, and half a cup of potato yeast or one good fresh yeast cake, a little salt and enough warm water to make a stiff batter. Beat it well, in the morning dissolve half a teaspoonful of soda and one or two tablespoonfuls of molasses. Should the cakes be sour, a little more soda must be added.
A yeast-raised overnight batter of the sort that ran continuously in nineteenth-century kitchens. The instructions assume you know to set it at night and cook it at daybreak, and they never say so outright.
- The hinge: it is an overnight spongeMix everything but the soda and molasses in the evening and leave it at cool room temperature, loosely covered, for 8 to 12 hours. The batter should be bubbly and smell tangy by morning; the soda and molasses go in just before cooking, and the batter should hit the griddle within a few minutes of that.
- A four-quart jar, half filledThat is roughly 2 quarts of buckwheat flour, about 7 to 8 cups, which makes a very large family batch. Half or quarter the whole thing unless you are feeding eight or more. The jar is the mixing and rising vessel, not a canning jar to be sealed.
- Indian meal and Graham flourIndian meal is cornmeal, fine or medium grind. Graham flour is coarse whole wheat, and ordinary whole-wheat flour stands in without complaint.
- One teacupPeriod teacup measures were not standardized; they are usually reckoned at somewhere between half and three-quarters of a modern cup. In a batter this loose the difference is immaterial.
- Potato yeast or a yeast cakePotato yeast was a home-kept liquid starter. A "good fresh yeast cake" would have been a cake of fresh yeast, sold in various sizes, roughly half an ounce to an ounce. For the full batch above use roughly 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast; less if the kitchen is warm.
- Stiff batter is a relative termBuckwheat drinks water. Aim for something that mounds on a spoon at night, then thin with warm water or milk in the morning to a pourable consistency after the soda goes in.
- The soda is for acid, not for liftThe soda is mainly for the acid -- Half a teaspoon neutralizes the sourness the overnight ferment has built, and the reaction gives some lift as it does so. Taste the batter: if it is sharp, add soda a pinch at a time. Too much gives a soapy, faintly metallic flavor and a grey cast.
- Griddle and yieldCook on a lightly greased griddle at medium-high, about 375F, turning once when the surface loses its shine and the bubbles set. The full batch yields something like four dozen cakes; buckwheat browns fast and darker than wheat, so judge by the edges.
- Keeping the batter goingTraditionally a cupful was held back as the start for the next night, refreshed with flour and water. It works, though the batter grows sourer by the week and wants proportionally more soda.
Buckwheat is not a wheat or a grass at all but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a fast-growing plant that tolerates poor, cool soil and so became a staple of northern Europe, Russia, and the upland Northeast and mid-Atlantic United States. Yeast-raised buckwheat cakes were a winter breakfast: the crop was harvested in autumn, and by the usual account the batter jar sat behind the stove through the cold months, the sour, faintly bitter cakes eaten with butter and molasses or maple syrup. The molasses here masks the metallic edge of the soda. The addition of cornmeal and Graham flour softens buckwheat's density, a common household adjustment; recipe books of the period print dozens of such variations, each family convinced of its own proportions. The continuously kept batter pot faded with the arrival of reliable commercial baking powder and, later, boxed self-rising pancake mixes, which is why buckwheat cakes now read as a specialty rather than an everyday breakfast.