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Buckwheat Cakes
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups lukewarm water 1 cup milk, scaled and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls light brown sugar 2 cups buckwheat flour 1 cup sifted white flour 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt BUCKWHEAT Cakes, prime favorites in years gone by, are still liked by many people. Made light as a feather and served at breakfast with tasty sausage or chops, they have a savory richness all their own.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquid, add buckwheat and white flour gradually, and salt. Beat until smooth. Cover and set aside in warm place, free from draught, to rise--about one hour. When light, stir well and bake on hot griddle.
If wanted for over night, use one-fourth cake of yeast and an extra half teaspoonful of salt. Cover and keep in a cool place.
A pourable yeast batter, risen for an hour and cooked on a griddle. It is a close sibling of the wheat griddle cakes elsewhere in the book, but buckwheat changes nearly everything about how it behaves.
- Which buckwheat flourLight buckwheat flour is sifted free of the hull and tastes of very little. Dark or whole buckwheat is what gives these cakes the gray color and the bitter, mineral edge the booklet is describing. Buckwheat is also high in fat and turns rancid faster than wheat flour, so buy it in small quantities and keep it in the freezer.
- The white flour is structuralBuckwheat is not a grass and forms no gluten at all. The single cup of white flour against two cups of buckwheat is what gives the batter enough body to hold the gas the yeast makes. Shifting the ratio toward buckwheat gives flatter, heavier, more fragile cakes that tear when turned.
- A quarter cake overnightFor the overnight version, a quarter of a yeast cake is roughly half a teaspoon of active dry yeast. The extra half teaspoon of salt is not seasoning. Salt slows yeast, and together with a cool spot it keeps a batter left out all night from rising, exhausting itself and falling before breakfast.
- Stir it downStirring the risen batter knocks the foam out and evens it, and that is intended. The cakes rise again on the griddle from steam and from the yeast still working. Ladled straight from the foam they cook with large, uneven holes and a wet streak through the middle.
- Brown sugar does two jobsTwo tablespoons feed the yeast at the start and, more visibly, brown the cakes. Buckwheat batter is pale and sets without much color of its own, so leaving the sugar out produces cakes that look raw when they are cooked through.
The booklet is frank that these are already a relic. Buckwheat cakes were “prime favorites in years gone by” and are still liked by some, which is the tone of a product being kept on the list out of respect. Buckwheat earned that place by growing where wheat would not, on thin, sour ground and in a short season, which made it a crop of the northern and upland farms. The overnight instruction points straight at the older habit behind the recipe: through the cold months a household kept a buckwheat batter going in a crock, holding back a cupful each morning to raise the next day’s cakes, so the flavor deepened and soured as the winter went on. What this page sells is the end of that crock. One cake of yeast, one hour, and the same breakfast without the custody of a living batter.