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Buckwheat Cakes
2 cups buckwheat flour 1 cup flour 6 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 2 1/2 cups milk or milk and water 1 tablespoon molasses 1 tablespoon shortening Sift together flours, baking powder and salt; add liquid, molasses and melted shortening; beat three minutes. Bake on hot greased griddle.
A quick-leavened buckwheat cake, offered as a shortcut to the older overnight yeast-raised batter. The recipe comes from a baking powder company, and the leavening is measured accordingly.
- Cut the baking powderSix teaspoons for three cups of flour is roughly double modern practice, reflecting both promotional generosity and older single-acting formulas. Three to four teaspoons gives plenty of lift; more leaves a soapy, metallic edge that buckwheat does nothing to hide.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only "hot." For pancakes that is usually read as a moderately hot griddle, in the region of 350-375F, or a heavy pan where a drop of water skitters rather than sits. Buckwheat tends to brown faster than wheat, so err low rather than high.
- Buckwheat flourNot a wheat at all but the seed of a knotweed relative. Light and dark grades behave differently: dark (whole-groat) flour is stronger and more astringent, light is milder. Either works, but buy it fresh and keep it cold, as the flour's own fat content makes it go rancid faster than wheat flour.
- The molasses is not for sweetnessOne tablespoon in this quantity of batter is a colouring and browning agent, feeding the Maillard reaction so the cakes take on the dark cast associated with buckwheat. Leave it out and the cakes look pale and taste flat.
- Beat three minutes, then stopTwo thirds of the flour here is buckwheat, which has no gluten, so the batter tolerates beating better than an all-wheat one would; the single cup of wheat flour still supplies some structure. Once the three minutes are up, cook promptly rather than letting the batter stand, since chemical leavening begins spending itself immediately.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means lard or vegetable shortening; a neutral oil substitutes at the same volume, and melted butter will also do, though it carries some water.
- Milk and waterThe recipe leaves the proportion open; cutting milk with water was an economy. All milk gives a richer, softer cake; the batter should pour thickly from the ladle and spread on its own without being pushed.
- YieldAbout sixteen to eighteen four-inch cakes, enough for four people.
Buckwheat cakes were a fixture of American winter breakfasts through the nineteenth century, when the standard method was a batter set overnight with yeast or a saved portion of the previous day's "sponge," kept going in a crock for weeks at a stretch. Buckwheat itself suited northern farms: it matures in ten to twelve weeks, tolerates poor soil, and was often sown as a late catch crop, which helped make it a cheap staple in Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Recipes like this one exist to replace the crock. Royal's cookbooks, distributed to sell baking powder, tend to recast slow ferments as same-morning chemical leavening, and the trade-off is visible on the plate: the tang of the sour overnight batter is gone, and the molasses is doing some of the work the fermentation used to do in colour and depth. The high baking powder measure is typical of manufacturer-issued cookbooks of the period, and it is tempting to read a commercial motive into it, though that remains an inference.