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Horsford Buckwheat Cakes
Mix " over night," with warm water, a little salt, and a tablespoon molasses, one pint buckwheat flour, to the usual consistency molasses , one pint buckwheat flour, to the usual consistency of griddle-cakes. When ready to bake for breakfast, add one measure each of acid and soda (or two heaping tea-spoons acid and one moderately heaping teaspoon soda) of Horsford's Bread Preparation-thinning the batter if necessary-and bake immediately on a hot griddle.
A two-part chemical leavening recipe written to sell a specific product. The mechanics translate cleanly once you know what Horsford's Bread Preparation was.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA boxed two-can product: one can of acid (monocalcium phosphate, sometimes with starch) and one of bicarbonate of soda, measured separately and combined at the last moment. The nearest modern stand-in is baking powder, pre-mixed though not chemically identical; roughly 1 tablespoon in place of the two acid and one soda teaspoons here.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, not weight: 2 cups, about 8 to 9 oz of buckwheat flour. Buckwheat drinks more water than wheat, so the overnight batter will thicken noticeably by morning.
- "To the usual consistency of griddle-cakes"Thick enough to mound briefly on the spoon and then settle, roughly heavy cream. The recipe assumes you will thin it again at baking time, which you almost certainly will need to do.
- Bake immediatelyThis is the hinge. Phosphate leavening starts working the instant the acid meets the soda in a wet batter, and unlike modern double-acting powder it gets no second lift from oven heat. Batter left standing ten minutes goes flat and heavy.
- The overnight soakNote that no yeast is called for, unlike many nineteenth-century buckwheat cake recipes. The standing time hydrates the flour, and may pick up a little sourness, though here the soda is paired with the acid supplied in the preparation.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only "a hot griddle": a heavy pan or griddle over medium, hot enough that a drop of water skitters. Buckwheat tends to brown faster and darker than wheat, so err on the cooler side.
- YieldNo yield is stated; a pint of flour thinned to griddle-cake consistency will make well over a dozen cakes of four inches. Buckwheat cakes were served with butter and more molasses or with syrup.
Eben Norton Horsford held the Rumford chair in chemistry at Harvard and, in the 1850s, worked out a way to leaven bread with calcium acid phosphate rather than the cream of tartar then imported from European wine-making. The Rumford Chemical Works, at Rumford in East Providence, Rhode Island, sold the result as Horsford's Bread Preparation, two cans to be measured together, before the single-can baking powder we know took over. Buckwheat cakes themselves were a cold-weather breakfast, traditionally raised with a yeast batter kept going in a crock from one morning to the next; the appeal of the chemical version was that it freed the cook from tending that crock.