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Shrewsbury Buckwheat Cakes
Mix a tea-cupful of good brewer's yeast with three pints of warm water; add half a tea-spoonful of salt, and stir in as much buckwheat meal as will make a thick batter. Cover and set it in a warm place to rise. When it is so light that bubbles appear on the surface, butter a frying-pan and bake the cakes in it, like pancakes, over a clear fire. A ladleful of the batter will be sufficient for each cake. Butter the cakes while hot, and serve them piled high in the centre of a hot plate, each one with the right side up. The batter will need to rise three or four hours.
A raised buckwheat batter of the kind kept going for breakfast after breakfast in nineteenth-century kitchens. The only real difficulty is the yeast, which no longer comes in the form the recipe assumes.
- Brewer's yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed from fermenting beer, roughly a cupful of active slurry. Modern equivalent is about 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast, dissolved in a little of the warm water first; do not substitute the dietary brewer's yeast powder sold as a supplement, which is dead and will not raise anything.
- QuantitiesA teacupful is about 5-6 fl oz. Three pints of water in an English book of this date is 60 imperial fl oz, a little over 7 US cups, which makes a very large batch. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a household of two or three.
- Buckwheat mealPlain buckwheat flour, unmixed. The recipe gives no weight because the cook judged by eye: add meal until the batter drops thickly from the ladle rather than pouring. Some modern cooks use half buckwheat and half plain flour for a lighter cake, though the flavour changes.
- Warm water, not hotWarm means blood heat, around 100F. Water much above that begins to harm the yeast, and at about 130-140F it will be killed outright and the batter will never bubble.
- The riseThe recipe allows three or four hours in a warm place. A longer, cooler rise, sometimes overnight, gives a more pronounced sour tang, though this recipe does not call for it. The batter is ready when the surface is domed and pocked with bubbles and it smells yeasty and slightly acid.
- Pan and heatA heavy frying pan, or a cast-iron griddle, over steady moderate heat is what 'a clear fire' is asking for: even radiant heat with no flare. The book gives no temperature. Butter lightly between cakes. Cook until the surface loses its gloss and the bubbles set, then turn once.
- Right side upPresumably the first side cooked, usually the flatter and more evenly browned one; the recipe does not explain the phrase. Piling the cakes that way is a matter of appearance, alongside the directions to butter them while hot and pile them high in the centre of a hot plate.
- YieldAt a ladleful each, the full quantity gives roughly 20 to 24 cakes, enough for six to eight people. Leftover batter keeps a day or two covered in the refrigerator and was traditionally topped up with fresh flour and water rather than started again.
Buckwheat is not a wheat at all but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a fast-growing plant of the dock family that tolerates poor, acid ground where cereals sulk, which is why it took hold in Brittany, Russia, and the northeastern United States. Raised buckwheat cakes were a fixture of the American winter breakfast table, the batter often kept alive in a crock from one morning to the next, and English books of the later nineteenth century picked them up as a novelty alongside the growing fashion for American breakfast dishes. The "Shrewsbury" in the title is decorative rather than geographic: most compendia of the day attached place names and personal names to variants for the sake of the index, and the town's own culinary reputation rests on its biscuits, not its griddle cakes. What distinguishes this version from a plain pancake is the yeast — barm, though hop and homemade yeasts were also in household use — which does the work that baking powder would do in a quicker recipe and leaves behind a mild sourness that suits buckwheat's earthy, slightly bitter flavour.