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Buckwheat Cakes, American
These cakes are seen on most American breakfast-tables. Mode of making:--To a pint of buckwheat-flour add a large tea-spoonful of baking-powder and a little salt. Mix to a thin batter, using lukewarm water in cold weather. The frying-pan requires to be only rubbed with grease, and the batter dropped in in quantities sufficient to cover an ordinary breakfast-plate at one time. When done on one side, turn, and send to table very hot and well buttered, or they can be eaten with treacle or syrup if preferred.
A quick-raised version of what was more often an overnight yeast batter. The instructions are terse but complete; the main adjustments are units and pan technique.
- A pint of flourCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces measured by volume, roughly 2.5 US cups of buckwheat flour, or about 280-300 g. Weigh it if you can: buckwheat packs unevenly and a scooped cup can vary by a third.
- "A large tea-spoonful"Spoon measures were not yet standardised, so the quantity is approximate. Read it as a rounded modern teaspoon and a half, or about 7 g of baking powder for that quantity of flour.
- Thin batterThin here means pourable and just short of running, closer to crepe batter than pancake batter, since it has to spread to plate size unaided. Expect somewhere near 500-600 ml of liquid; add it gradually and stop when a spoonful sheets off rather than mounds.
- Lukewarm water in cold weatherPossibly a holdover from yeast-raised buckwheat batters, where temperature governed the rise; it may equally be no more than a way of keeping a cold-weather batter workable. With baking powder it only matters in that a very cold batter is sluggish; the chemical leavening starts working the moment liquid hits it, so cook promptly rather than letting the bowl stand.
- The greased panBuckwheat has no gluten and the cakes are fragile. A well-seasoned cast-iron pan or a good non-stick surface, rubbed rather than pooled with fat, over medium heat. Turn only once, when the surface has dulled and the edges have set.
- TreacleIn a British book this means black treacle or golden syrup; black treacle is close kin to American molasses. Molasses or maple syrup are the usual partners for these cakes in their home country.
- YieldPlate-sized cakes as described will give six to eight; smaller ones, which are considerably easier to flip, will give about a dozen and a half. Buckwheat alone tastes strongly of itself, and it is often cut with a quarter to a third plain flour.
Buckwheat is not wheat and not a grass at all but a seed of the dock and sorrel family, grown across the northern United States because it tolerates poor soil and a short season. It was a winter crop in the sense that its cakes were a winter food: households in Pennsylvania, New England and the mid-Atlantic kept a crock of yeast-raised buckwheat batter by the stove, drawing off enough for breakfast each morning and refreshing the remainder with flour and water so the same ferment ran for weeks. The version recorded here is the quicker one, substituting baking powder for the standing batter, and it appears in a British dictionary of cookery as a piece of reportage as much as a recipe: the compilers note the dish is on "most American breakfast-tables" and pass along the method for the curious.