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Sour Dough Buckwheat Cakes
Mix 3/4 buckwheat flour with 1/4 corn meal. Make into batter with sweet milk or water and add a freshly boiled and well mashed potato. Let stand overnight in a warm room, add salt and bake thoroughly on not too hot a griddle until pancakes are well browned on both sides.
A spontaneous-ferment pancake batter of the kind kept going in a crock from one breakfast to the next. The proportions are given by volume, and the overnight stand does the leavening.
- The fractions are volume, not weightRead it as three parts buckwheat flour to one part cornmeal by measure. For a household batch, 1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour to 1/2 cup cornmeal, with roughly 2 cups liquid, gives a pourable batter.
- No leaven is namedAs written the batter depends on wild yeast and bacteria from the flour and the warm room. If you keep a sourdough starter, a half cup stirred in at the outset makes the result reliable; without it the overnight stand may give sourness with very little lift.
- Sweet milkThat means fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber a period kitchen also had on hand. Water is the safer choice for a batter that will sit out all night.
- The potato is doing workMashed boiled potato feeds the ferment with starch and sugars and keeps the cakes tender, buckwheat having no gluten to speak of. One medium potato, mashed with no lumps and cooled before it goes in, is right for the quantity above.
- "A warm room" means about 70F"A warm room" -- Eight to twelve hours somewhere comfortably warm; the recipe gives no temperature. Much warmer and the batter turns sharply sour and thin; a cold kitchen will leave it flat.
- Salt goes in last for a reasonSalt goes in in the morning -- Salt slows fermentation, which may be why it is held back rather than mixed in at the outset; the recipe gives no reason. About a teaspoon for the batch, stirred in just before baking.
- Griddle heat"Not too hot" is best judged by a drop of water skittering rather than vanishing; moderate heat, not high. Buckwheat browns faster than wheat, and the cakes need to cook through before the surface darkens.
- Keeping it goingHold back a cupful of the risen batter before you salt it, and use that to start the next night's mixing. This is how the crock stayed alive through a winter.
- YieldThe quantities above make roughly a dozen four-inch cakes, enough for three or four people.
Buckwheat cakes were a cold-weather breakfast across much of nineteenth-century North America, and the sourdough version suited kitchens without dependable yeast or fresh baking powder: a crock of batter was mixed at night, part of it saved back in the morning, and the chain continued for weeks. Buckwheat is not a wheat but the seed of a fast-growing plant related to sorrel and rhubarb, valued because it ripened on poor ground in a short season, which is why it turns up so often in upland and frontier cookery. The mashed potato is an old and practical trick, feeding the ferment and softening a flour that has no gluten to hold air. The ingredients suit travel and rough kitchens: flour, meal, salt and a potato keep well, and the leavening looks after itself overnight.