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Buckwheat Cakes (Quart buckwheat flour pint)
1 quart buckwheat flour. 1 pint sifted corn meal. Half teacup of yeast. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Enough water to make a stiff batter. After rising, stir in a half teacup of butter or lard. Let it rise a second time, grease the griddle, dip the spoon in lightly, and cook quickly.--Mrs.P.W.
Another Recipe for Buckwheat Cakes.
1 pint of buckwheat flour. 1 tablespoonful of meal. 1 tablespoonful of yeast. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Make up with water the over-night, and beat till it bubbles. In the morning beat again, and just before baking stir in a pinch of soda dissolved in milk or water.--Mrs. Col. W.
Two versions of the same overnight raised-batter cake, one enriched with fat and cornmeal, the other lean and leavened by long fermentation with a corrective pinch of soda. The hinge in both is the second, short rise: the batter must go onto the griddle while it is still lively and full of bubbles.
- TeacupA teacup in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup, not a modern mug. Taking it at three-quarters, half a teacup of fat is about 6 tablespoons; half a teacup of yeast is about 3 fl oz of liquid barm.
- The yeastBoth recipes assume homemade liquid yeast (barm or potato yeast), which is mostly water. Substituting modern yeast means accounting for that liquid: about 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast in place of the half teacup, with the missing 3 fl oz added back as water. The tablespoonful in the second recipe is a similarly wet leaven, not a spoon of granules.
- Buckwheat flourUse light or unroasted buckwheat flour if you want the mild version; dark whole buckwheat gives the strong, faintly bitter flavour these cakes were prized for. Buckwheat has no gluten, which is why the batter is beaten rather than kneaded.
- Stiff batterStiff here means thick and spoonable, not doughy — it should drop from the spoon in a heavy blob and spread slowly on the griddle. It loosens as it ferments overnight, so err on the thick side.
- The pinch of sodaAn overnight ferment turns sour by morning. The soda in the second recipe neutralises that acid and gives a burst of lift just before baking. Dissolve it fully and stir it in at the last moment; leave the batter standing after adding it and the lift is spent.
- Cook quicklyA griddle at 375-400F. Buckwheat cakes want a hot surface and a short time — about 2 minutes on the first side, until the surface is holed and the edges set, then a minute after turning. Slow cooking gives them a heavy, gummy crumb.
- Keeping a batter goingSome households of the period held back a cupful of the risen batter as the leaven for the next morning, topping it up with fresh flour, water and salt, and such a pot could be kept running through the winter. If you do this, refrigerate the reserve and refresh it daily.
- YieldThe first recipe is a large one — a quart of buckwheat and a pint of meal makes roughly 24 to 30 cakes of griddle size. The second makes about 8 to 10.
Raised buckwheat cakes were a cold-weather breakfast across the eastern United States, and buckwheat itself was a farmer's catch crop: it matures in ten or twelve weeks, tolerates poor ground, and could be sown after a failed planting. That gave it a place in Virginia kitchens as a winter grain. The two recipes show the older leavening world plainly — homemade yeast set the night before and, in the second version, a pinch of soda to sweeten the sourness that a long ferment inevitably brings. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears twice over with different initials attached; the book preserves household practice rather than standardising it.