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Buckwheat Cakes
Buckwheat flour, when properly ground, is perfectly free from grits. The grain should be run through the smutter with a strong blast before grinding, and the greatest care taken through the whole process. Adulteration with rye or corn cheapens the flour, but injures the quality. The pure buckwheat is best, and is unsurpassed for griddle-cakes. To make batter, warm one pint sweet milk and one pint water (one may be cold and the other boiling); put half this mixture in a stone crock, add five tea-cups buckwheat flour, beat well until smooth, add the rest of the milk and water, and last a tea-cup of yeast. Or, the same ingredients and proportions may be used except adding two table-spoons of molasses or sugar, and using one quart of water instead of one pint each of milk and water. - Miss S. A. Melching.
This is an overnight yeast-raised batter, not a baking-powder cake, and everything about the result depends on that long ferment. Start it the night before you want to eat.
- The hinge: overnight riseThe recipe never says it, but a teacup of yeast in a cool crock means a rise of 8 to 12 hours at room temperature. Mix it in the evening, cover loosely, and cook in the morning when the batter is bubbled, loose and faintly sour.
- Yeast quantityA tea-cup of 19th-century yeast was liquid barm or a homemade potato/hop yeast of unknown strength, so no exact conversion exists. One packet of active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp) softened in a little of the warm liquid gives a comparable overnight ferment.
- Tea-cups and pintsA tea-cup in period American cookbooks is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though this book never defines it; on that reckoning five tea-cups of buckwheat flour is roughly 3 3/4 cups, or about 1 lb by weight. A pint is 2 cups. The batter should pour thickly, like heavy cream.
- Temperature of the liquid"One may be cold and the other boiling" is the period's way of hitting blood heat without a thermometer. Aim for the combined liquid at 100-110F; boiling liquid poured straight onto yeast will kill it.
- Buckwheat flour todayModern buckwheat flour is milled from hulled groats and needs no smutter. Light buckwheat is milder; dark, hull-flecked flour tastes closer to what Miss Melching would have used. Buckwheat has no gluten, so the batter relies largely on fermentation gas for its lift.
- The crock as a keeperHolding back a cup or two of risen batter and feeding it fresh flour and water the next night was a common practice with buckwheat batters, though this recipe does not mention it. If you keep it going, refrigerate between uses and warm it before feeding.
- If it turns sourAfter a long or warm rise the batter can go sharp. A scant 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda stirred in just before cooking neutralizes the acid and adds lift; do not add it the night before.
- GriddleCook on a lightly greased griddle at about 375F. Buckwheat browns faster and darker than wheat batter, and the cakes are done when the surface loses its wet sheen; turning them more than once makes them heavy.
- YieldAbout two quarts of batter, giving something over two dozen 4-inch cakes, enough for four to six people. The second version, with water and molasses and no milk, is the plainer everyday batter and browns more deeply.
Buckwheat cakes were the standard cold-weather breakfast across the northern states and Canada in the 19th century, and the crock of batter kept behind the stove from November to March is one of the small domestic institutions that has since vanished. Buckwheat is not a wheat at all but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a fast, undemanding crop that tolerated thin ground and short seasons, which is why it turns up so heavily in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York farm cookery. The opening paragraph on smutters and adulteration is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery (1877), which regularly instructs readers on how a raw ingredient ought to be produced before telling them what to do with it; a smutter was the mill machine that blasted dust, hulls and fungal smut off the grain before grinding, and complaints about buckwheat cut with rye or corn were a real grievance in an era before labeling law. The attribution to Miss S. A. Melching reflects the book's origin as a compiled community collection, assembled to raise funds for a parsonage in Marysville, Ohio.