No. 3272

Buckwheat Cakes with Yeast

Galettes de Sarrasin a la Levure

Put a pound of buckwheat flour in a bowl with four ounces of corn flour, two ounces of sugar and a coffeespoonful of salt; dilute all these ingredients with a quart of water, beat the mixture well to have it smooth, then add three-quarters of an ounce of yeast dissolved in a little tepid water; when all has been well stirred together cover the vessel with a cloth and keep it in a temperate place until the dough has risen to double its volume, which will take at least four hours or even more; stir with a spoon and work into it two tablespoonfuls of molasses; the paste is now ready. Heat a griddle (Fig. 602), and as soon as it is sufficiently hot and smokes rub it over with a cloth and butter with clarified butter or lard; pour on enough preparation to form small cakes three and a half to four inches in diameter, and a quarter of an inch thick; in order to have them round and of equal thickness iron rings beveled on the outside are used. When the cakes are firm enough, which will take about two or three minutes, lift up the rings and turn the cakes over to finish cooking for two or three minutes longer. Dress them on a very hot covered dish and serve at once.

← No. 3271 Buckwheat Cakes with Baking Powder Breakfast Cakes No. 3273 Flannel Cakes →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward yeast-risen buckwheat batter from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen. The only real difficulty is that two of its measures no longer mean what they did.

The hinge: let it rise fullyBuckwheat has no gluten worth speaking of, so the four-hour ferment is doing all the leavening and most of the flavor. Undershoot it and the cakes are flat and grassy; the recipe's own test is that the batter has risen to double its volume, and it should smell sour before you stir it down. A cool overnight rise (8-12 hours in the refrigerator, then an hour at room temperature) may give better flavor than a rushed warm one.
"Corn flour"In American cookbooks of this period the term usually means finely ground cornmeal rather than cornstarch, and either will work here — fine cornmeal for a little texture, cornstarch for tenderness. Four ounces is by weight, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of fine cornmeal.
YeastThree-quarters of an ounce means compressed fresh cake yeast, about 21 g. Substitute roughly 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast; more than that will sour the batter before it has risen.
CoffeespoonfulSmaller than a modern teaspoon — read it as about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of fine salt for the full batch.
Batter consistencyA quart of water to about 22 ounces of dry ingredients gives a thin, pourable batter, closer to crepe batter than pancake batter. The recipe calls for rings to keep the cakes round and of equal thickness; without them a batter this loose will spread past four inches.
The ringsBeveled iron rings are simply what we now sell as crumpet or egg rings. Butter the inside of each as well as the griddle, or the set batter will cling and tear when you lift them.
Griddle heatThe recipe has the bare griddle heated until it smokes, and only then rubbed over and greased. Use the clarified butter or lard it specifies; whole butter would scorch over the two to three minutes per side.
MolassesStirred in after fermentation, once the batter has been knocked down. It darkens the cakes considerably — judge doneness by the edges setting, not by color.
YieldSomething over two dozen cakes of the specified size, enough for six to eight at breakfast. Ranhofer's instruction to serve at once is worth obeying; buckwheat cakes turn leathery in a warming oven.

A Little History

Yeast-raised buckwheat cakes were a fixture of the nineteenth-century American winter breakfast, when buckwheat — a fast-growing crop that tolerates poor soil, and botanically not a wheat at all but a relative of rhubarb and sorrel — was milled in quantity across the northern states. Many households kept a standing batter crock, holding back a cupful each morning to start the next day's rise, a sourdough practice that Charles Ranhofer's restaurant version replaces with fresh yeast for consistency. That this recipe appears in The Epicurean (1894) under a French title, galettes de sarrasin, is itself telling: Ranhofer, French-trained chef of Delmonico's in New York, was cataloguing an American griddle cake for a clientele that expected its menu in French, and buckwheat galettes were equally at home in Brittany, where the grain has its own long history. The book places it between versions leavened with baking powder and the softer flannel cake, a small survey of how a New York kitchen might raise a breakfast batter.