Bread: Cakes
Entire-Buckwheat Cakes. 2 cupfuls warm milk, cake yeast, 1 teaspoonful salt, Buckwheat flour, 1 teaspoonful soda, cupful boiling water, 1 tablespoonful molasses.
The general idea is that you have to mix buckwheat with white flour to make good cakes, but they are excellent made with buckwheat alone. as Pour the milk into a mixing bowl, add the dissolved yeast, and stir in much buckwheat flour as will make a medium batter, then add the salt and molasses, and leave the batter to stand over night. In the morning, when ready to bake, dissolve the soda in boiling water, stir it in, beat for a few minutes, then make your cakes. Turn them just once.
Luncheon Rolls. 2 cupfuls sifted flour, cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls sugar, 1 cake yeast.
An overnight buckwheat batter raised with yeast rather than baking powder, sweetened with molasses and slackened with a soda-and-water solution at the griddle. The transcription has lost several fractions, so a few quantities need judgment.
- Missing fractionsThe printed text drops a fraction before "cupful boiling water" and gives no quantity at all for the yeast; the soda is printed with its measure ("1 teaspoonful"). A quarter-cup of boiling water to dissolve the soda is a reasonable reading; much more will thin the batter past pouring consistency.
- Cake yeastOne cake of compressed yeast is usually reckoned equivalent to about 2¼ teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, though the size and strength of period cakes varied. For an overnight rise at room temperature, half a packet is plenty; a full packet risks a batter that peaks and collapses by morning.
- Warm milk"Warm" here means blood heat, around 100F. Milk much hotter than that will damage the yeast, and very hot milk will kill it; period bread recipes commonly call for milk scalded and then cooled to lukewarm.
- The soda is not leaveningBy morning the batter is sour from a long ferment. The soda neutralises that acidity and gives a last push of gas as it hits the griddle. Stir it in just before baking and start cooking within a few minutes — waiting lets the lift escape.
- All-buckwheat batterThe note is correct that buckwheat alone works, but with no gluten the batter behaves differently: it should be loose enough to spread on its own, thinner than a wheat pancake batter, or the cakes come out dense and gummy in the middle.
- Griddle heat and the single turnMedium-high, around 375F on an electric griddle. Buckwheat browns fast and darkens further with each flip, so "turn them just once" is practical advice, not fussiness — flip when the surface bubbles have set and the edges look dry.
- Keeping a batter goingHouseholds of the period held back a cupful of the risen batter as a starter for the next night, topping it up with fresh milk and flour. If you do this, refrigerate the reserve and use it within a few days.
- YieldTwo cups of milk plus the flour it will carry makes roughly sixteen to eighteen cakes of four inches, serving four.
- The Luncheon RollsOnly the ingredient list survives on this page; the method is missing. Treat it as a fragment rather than a recipe to follow.
Buckwheat is not a grain but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a fast-growing plant that tolerates poor, acid soil, which is why it took hold in the northern states, upstate New York and Pennsylvania in particular. Buckwheat cakes were a winter breakfast: the yeasted overnight batter was kept alive in a crock in the kitchen from the first cold weather until spring, replenished each evening and never quite finished. The author's insistence that buckwheat needs no wheat flour to make good cakes was a mild dissent from common practice, since cutting it with white flour for a lighter, blander cake was, by the recipe's own account, "the general idea." The molasses feeds the yeast, and the morning soda is the standard corrective for any long-fermented batter that has turned sour overnight.