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Buckwheat Cakes
2 pounds of buck wheat flour. 2 quarts of water. 1 cupful of yeast. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 large basting-spoonful of syrup. 1 large basting-spoonful of melted lard.
Make a sponge or batter, overnight, with the warm water, yeast and flour. In the morning add the enriching ingredients, beat up well and bake thin cakes on a griddle The great majority of people prefer buck wheat cakes with about a fifth part corn meal mixed with the buckwheat. And twice as much shortening as above will please them better. No eggs need ever be used with buckwheat. After the first mixing with yeast some of the batter may be saved and used instead of yeast for several succeeding days. A teaspoonful of carbonate of soda may then be needed to be mixed in the batter n the morning, but cakes made that way, for some reason, are more palatable than with sweet yeast-care being taken to proportion the soda to the degree of slight sourness. The neatest way to grease the cake griddle is with a piece of ham rind cut off large for the purpose, and the batter should be poured from a pitcher, or a can having a coffee pot spout.
Where the smoke and smell is an objection the cakes can be baked just as well without grease, not only on soapstone griddles but on iron ones as well, if they be rubbed with a cloth after every baking, to keep them polished. We do not insist on the adoption of the cleaner plan, because cakes half fried are eaten with a better relish than the others-and hotel cooks are not expected to be reformers.
Goffers are gaufres, and they are wafers, or thin cakes, whence waffles, which are, or used to be, called also soft wafers. But thin cakes were of more than one sort. Almond gaufres and some others are a king of candy cakes, thin and crisp. Flemish gaufres are our waffles, but made so rich that they are used as a pastry dish for dinner with jellies and marmalades. They are also used in all their richness for breakfast, where expense is no object, but can hardly come under the head of breakfast bread in ordinary. The next receipt is the happy mean which just suits.
An overnight yeast-raised batter of the kind that once lived in a crock on the back of the stove all winter. The recipe is written for a hotel griddle, so the first job is scaling it down.
- Yield and scalingTwo pounds of buckwheat flour and two quarts of water make roughly three quarts of batter — perhaps forty thin cakes. A quarter batch (8 oz flour, 2 cups water) is a sensible household quantity.
- A cupful of yeastThis means liquid barm or a homemade yeast, not granules. About 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast will raise the full 2 lb batch overnight; use a scant 1/2 teaspoon for a quarter batch.
- Basting-spoonfulA basting spoon of the period held considerably more than a tablespoon — figure 2 to 3 tablespoons, though the amount is genuinely imprecise. The syrup and the lard are both there for browning and tenderness, and the note that doubling the fat pleases most people is sound.
- Flour weight to volumeTwo pounds of buckwheat flour is about 7 cups; it packs differently from wheat flour, so weigh it if you can. The optional fifth part cornmeal (6 to 8 oz here, depending on whether the fifth is reckoned against the buckwheat or against the whole mixture) gives the cakes grit and a sweeter edge.
- The batter should be thinTwo quarts of water to two pounds of flour makes a pourable batter, which is why the author specifies a pitcher or spouted can. Buckwheat has no gluten, so a thin batter is what produces the lacy, tender cake rather than a heavy pancake.
- Keeping the batter overSaving a cup of the risen batter to start the next morning's is a sourdough practice; refrigerate it if you are not using it daily. The soda is added to neutralise the accumulated acidity, and the instruction to proportion it to the degree of sourness is exact — too much soda gives a soapy, greenish cake.
- No eggsThe recipe's 'no eggs need ever be used' stands on its own: the lift comes from the yeast, and later from the soda reacting with the soured batter.
- Griddle heat and greasingThe recipe gives no temperature; a medium-hot griddle (around 375F on a modern one) keeps the thin batter from spreading too far. The ham-rind swab lays down a very thin film, and a well-seasoned iron pan wiped between cakes works as the author describes.
- The closing paragraphThe remarks on gaufres, wafers and waffles are the author's aside introducing the next recipe, not part of this one.
Buckwheat cakes were a winter breakfast staple across the northern United States in the nineteenth century, particularly in the Dutch- and German-settled areas of the mid-Atlantic where buckwheat — not a grain at all, but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum — grew well on poor ground and short seasons. Keeping an overnight sponge alive from day to day appears to have been a common domestic method, a spoonful reserved each morning to raise the next day's, which is why the recipe treats souring and its correction with soda as routine rather than a fault. The author's frank remark that hotel cooks are not expected to be reformers points to a book written with professional griddles in view, where the cakes were greased as guests preferred them.