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Buckwheat Cakes
1/3 cup fine bread crumbs 2 cups scalded milk ½ teaspoon salt ¼ yeast cake ½ cup lukewarm water 1¾ cups buckwheat flour 1 tablespoon molasses Pour milk over crumbs, and soak thirty minutes; add salt, yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water, and buckwheat to make a batter thin enough to pour. Let rise over night; in the morning, stir well, add molasses, one-fourth teaspoon soda dissolved in one-fourth cup lukewarm water, and cook same as griddle-cakes. Save enough batter to raise another mixing, instead of using yeast cake; it will require one-half cup.
An overnight yeast-raised buckwheat batter of the kind kept going for weeks in a covered crock through the winter. It behaves more like a sourdough starter than a quick batter, so plan the timing before you begin.
- The hinge: the soda goes in lastThe overnight ferment turns distinctly sour, and the quarter teaspoon of soda dissolved in warm water neutralizes that acid and gives the final lift. Stir it in just before the batter hits the griddle; if it sits, the gas is wasted and the cakes come out flat and tangy.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied. A quarter cake is a small amount of yeast, which suits a ferment running eight to twelve hours at room temperature. Something on the order of 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of instant dry yeast is in the same range; much more will exhaust the batter before morning.
- Buckwheat flourBuckwheat is not a wheat and carries no gluten, so the batter never develops structure and stays pourable. Modern light buckwheat flour is generally more finely sifted than the period product, so the cakes may come out a little more delicate, but the method is unchanged.
- Scalded milkScalding was done to kill enzymes and organisms in raw milk. With pasteurized milk it serves only to soften the crumbs, so heating it to steaming is enough. Let it fall to lukewarm before the yeast goes in or the yeast dies.
- ConsistencyThe instruction to make "a batter thin enough to pour" governs the flour quantity. Aim for heavy cream: it should ribbon off the spoon and spread on its own on the griddle.
- Griddle heatMedium, lightly greased; the recipe specifies no temperature. Buckwheat browns faster and darker than wheat batter, so the first cake is a test cake. Turn when the surface bubbles have opened and stay open.
- Keeping the batter goingThe half cup held back is a live starter. Refrigerate it in a covered non-reactive container and refresh it the next evening with milk, crumbs and buckwheat; the sourness deepens over successive days. Discard it if it shows pink or orange discoloration or any mould growth.
- YieldAbout sixteen four-inch cakes, serving four.
Buckwheat cakes were a fixture of the northern American winter breakfast, and the crock of batter kept alive on the cellar stairs from one morning to the next is often described as a household institution in the nineteenth century, though the practice is more often recalled than documented. Buckwheat grows fast on poor ground and tolerates short seasons, which made it a staple of New England and the mid-Atlantic uplands long after wheat flour became cheap; the sour, yeast-risen cake is generally taken to be the older form, predating the baking-powder griddle cake that displaced it. Cookbooks of the period that set the recipe alongside quicker cakes mark the transition: the overnight method is given faithfully, with the note about saving batter, while the surrounding pages increasingly rely on chemical leavening and a ten-minute start.