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Quick Buckwheat Cakes
One quart of buckwheat flour, one-half a teacup of corn meal or wheat flour, a little salt, and two tablespoons of syrup. Wet these with cold or warm water to a thin batter, and add, lastly, four good tablespoons of Cook's Friend baking powder.
A chemically leavened version of what was normally an overnight yeast batter. The measurements are workable, but the leavening is far out of modern proportion.
- Buckwheat flour by the quartA quart is 4 cups, roughly 15-17 oz / 425-480 g of buckwheat flour. Use light or dark buckwheat as you like; dark is more assertive and probably closer to what the book's readers had.
- Half a teacupThe teacup was not a standard measure; it is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 8 fl oz, so half is on the order of 1/4 to 1/3 cup of cornmeal or wheat flour. Its job is body and a little crispness, since buckwheat has no gluten.
- Four tablespoons of baking powderThis is the one figure to ignore. Modern double-acting baking powder needs about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup of flour, so 4 cups wants 4 to 5 teaspoons total, not 12. Early powders were weaker and less reliably blended; at the original rate you get a soapy, metallic, bitter cake.
- Cook's FriendA branded baking powder sold in Canada in the late nineteenth century, one of several whose names turn up inside recipes in books that also carried their advertising. Any modern baking powder stands in for it.
- The syrupTwo tablespoons of molasses, cane syrup or corn syrup. It is there for colour and browning as much as sweetness, and buckwheat cakes without it look pale and taste flat.
- Batter consistencyThin means pourable, about like heavy cream, thinner than a wheat pancake batter. Buckwheat swells on standing, so mix it, add the leavening last as directed, and cook straight away rather than letting it sit.
- Griddle heatA moderately hot griddle, about 375F, lightly greased. The cakes are done when the surface loses its gloss and the bubbles stop closing over; they brown fast because of the syrup.
- YieldA large batch: somewhere upwards of twenty cakes of 4 inches, depending how thin you take the batter. Serve with butter and more syrup.
Buckwheat cakes were a standard cold-weather breakfast across the northern United States and Canada, and the usual method was slow: a batter set with yeast or a saved portion of the previous day's sponge, left to work overnight in a crock by the stove, with a cupful held back to start the next morning's batch. The interest of this recipe is the word quick -- it replaces that ferment with a spoonful of manufactured baking powder, the labour-saving convenience of the 1870s household. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto by "ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns," and like many subscription cookbooks of the period it carried commercial advertising; brand names such as Cook's Friend appear inside the recipes themselves, which is worth remembering when a proprietary powder is called for by name. Buckwheat, despite the name, is not a wheat or even a grass but the seed of Fagopyrum, a fast-growing crop that tolerated poor northern soil and gave these cakes their grey colour and sour-earthy flavour.