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Buckwheat Pancakes (Over Night)
1 quart water yeast cake 1 teaspoon (heaping) salt 1 tablespoon brown sugar Buckwheat to make stiff batter.
Let rise over night. In morning, dissolve 1 level teaspoon soda in a little water and add to the batter.
A classic overnight raised batter: yeast does the leavening, and the morning soda is there to tame the acidity that develops in the jar, not to lift the cakes. A few translations make it workable.
- The garbled first lineThe original runs the ingredients together: it is 1 quart water and 1 yeast cake. One cake of compressed yeast is roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast.
- Water temperatureUse lukewarm water, around 100F, if you want the batter working promptly. A quart of cold water will still rise overnight in a warm kitchen but more slowly.
- "Buckwheat to make stiff batter"Genuinely imprecise, and it depends on your flour. The recipe gives no quantity; you will need several cups of buckwheat flour to a quart of water, from about 4 cups upward, and the only reliable guide is feel: a batter that mounds on the spoon and falls slowly, since it will loosen and slacken as it ferments.
- Buckwheat flour itselfPeriod buckwheat was often a coarser, darker meal than modern light buckwheat flour, which is sifted finer and milder; dark or whole buckwheat flour gives closer to the intended flavor. Buckwheat has no gluten, so some cooks of the era cut it with a cup of wheat flour for body ele}, {
- The soda is the hingeAfter ten or twelve hours the batter is frankly sour. The level teaspoon of soda dissolved in water neutralizes that acid and produces a burst of gas; stir it in gently and cook soon after, as the lift fades within minutes. Skip it and the pancakes taste sharp.
- Overnight vesselUse a container at least twice the batter's volume, covered but not sealed. A quart of water plus flour will climb and can foam over a bowl filled to the brim.
- GriddleA greased griddle at about 375F, medium heat. Buckwheat browns fast and burns faster than wheat, so watch the first cake and adjust.
- YieldRoughly two dozen four-inch cakes — a family batch by the standards of the book. Halve it for two or three people.
- Keeping the batter goingA common practice was to reserve a cup of the risen batter as the start for the next night, adding fresh water, flour and salt rather than new yeast. It works, though the batter grows sourer over a week and needs a little more soda each time.
Raised buckwheat cakes were a fixture of Canadian and northern American winter breakfasts, and the overnight jar or crock kept behind the stove is often said to have been a household institution — the batter, by traditional accounts, fed and carried from November through to spring, much like a sourdough start. Buckwheat suited the climate: it is not a true cereal but the seed of a plant that matures in ten or twelve weeks and tolerates poor, acid soil, making it a reliable crop where wheat struggled. Because it has no gluten, buckwheat batters were leavened wet and slack rather than kneaded, and the soda added at the last moment is the tell of a fermented batter, correcting sourness the same way saleratus corrected sour milk in a hundred other recipes of the period. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by a flour miller, is a small irony — but pancake sections of the era routinely carried buckwheat alongside the wheat-flour cakes because readers expected it.