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Buckwheat Cakes
yeast cake ½ cup corn meal or white flour 1 cup lukewarm water 1 teaspoon salt 4 cup molasses 2 cups warm water 1 teaspoon soda Mix buckwheat, corn meal, and salt; add dissolved yeast cake, molasses, and water; beat well. Let rise over night. In the morning beat, add soda, beat, and fry.
A pitcher is the most convenient dish for raising these cakes. 1½ cups Indian meal 1½ cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar
An overnight yeast-raised griddle batter of the old New England type, mixed in a pitcher so it can be poured straight onto the griddle. The quantity of buckwheat flour has dropped out of the ingredient list; the usual proportion in books of this period is 2 to 2½ cups of buckwheat to the ½ cup of cornmeal or white flour.
- The hinge: soda goes in lastThe overnight ferment turns distinctly sour, and the teaspoon of soda beaten in at the last moment neutralises that acid and gives the lift. Add it just before frying, not the night before, or the gas escapes and the cakes are flat and sour.
- Yeast cakeYeast cakes of this period varied in size and potency; as a rough modern substitute use one 2¼-teaspoon packet of active dry yeast, judging by how the batter rises. Dissolve it in the cup of lukewarm water before mixing in.
- Indian mealCornmeal. The finer the grind, the smoother the cake; a coarse stone-ground meal gives a pleasant grittiness but wants an extra few minutes to hydrate.
- MolassesThe stated "4 cup molasses" is a lost fraction, almost certainly ¼ cup. Use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is harsh against the buckwheat.
- Rising overnightEight to ten hours at cool room temperature (65-70F) is right. A warm modern kitchen will over-ferment the batter to the point of thin, ropy sourness; if your room runs above 75F, use the refrigerator for the second half of the night.
- "Fry"A griddle or heavy skillet over moderate heat, lightly greased; the recipe gives no temperature. The batter is thinner than a modern pancake batter and spreads on its own; turn once, when the surface bubbles have set and the edges look dry.
- YieldWith the buckwheat restored to about 2 cups, the batter makes roughly 18 to 20 cakes of four inches, serving four to five.
- Keeping a batter goingPeriod practice was to hold back a cup of the risen batter as the leaven for the next night's cakes, feeding it with fresh flour, water and salt. That works and saves the yeast, but discard the reserve if it develops any off colour or smell.
Buckwheat cakes were a common winter breakfast in the northern United States through the nineteenth century, and the sequence here is a familiar one: buckwheat is low in gluten and does not rise like wheat, so cooks leaned on an overnight yeast ferment and a corrective pinch of soda rather than the quick chemical leavens then coming into use for wheat griddle cakes. Buckwheat itself is not a wheat or even a grass but the seed of a plant related to sorrel and rhubarb; it grows fast on poor ground, which made it a reliable crop in stony New England and upstate New York, and gave millers a cheap dark flour to sell all winter. The pitcher recommended in the last line let the batter be mixed, raised, and poured from a single vessel.