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Buckwheat Cakes
Place in a bowl two ounces buckwheat flour, one ounce cornmeal flour, one ounce wheat flour, one saltspoon salt, one whole egg, two gills cold milk, half gill lukewarm water, one teaspoon butter, one teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon baking powder and a tablespoon molasses. Sharply mix the whole together with a whisk for five minutes.
Lightly grease a large frying pan; then with the aid of a small ladle drop in sufficient batter to make at one time four separate cakes, two and a half inches in diameter, and cook for one and a half minutes on each side, or until they have attained a good golden colour. Lift up with a cake turner, place on a hot dish, keep warm; then proceed to cook eight more in the same way, and send to the table with maple syrup.
A quick baking-powder version of what was traditionally an overnight yeast batter. The measurements are by weight for the flours and by gill for the liquid, so a scale and a conversion are both useful.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of milk and half a gill is a quarter cup of water. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- The flours by weightTwo ounces of buckwheat is roughly a scant half cup, one ounce of cornmeal about three tablespoons, one ounce of wheat flour a scant quarter cup. Weigh them if you can; buckwheat and cornmeal pack very differently by volume.
- Expect a thin batterFour ounces of flour to a cup and a quarter of liquid gives a pourable, crepe-adjacent batter rather than a thick pancake batter. That is intentional here, and it is what lets a ladleful spread to two and a half inches on its own.
- Five minutes of whiskingBuckwheat has no gluten to toughen and the wheat flour is only about a quarter of the flour by weight, so vigorous mixing does little harm. It will also help dissolve the molasses and keep the cornmeal in suspension.
- Melt the butterA teaspoon of butter will not disperse cold into a cold batter. Melt it and whisk it in last, or the fat stays in specks.
- Pan heat and timingA minute and a half a side suits a pan at medium, around 350-375F. Buckwheat browns faster and darker than wheat, so judge by colour and by bubbles setting at the edges rather than by the clock alone.
- YieldTwelve cakes of two and a half inches, small by modern standards. That is one or two servings as a breakfast, three or four as part of a larger table.
- Buckwheat flour keeps badlyIt carries more fat than wheat flour and can turn rancid and bitter within a few months at room temperature. Buy it fresh and store it in the freezer.
Buckwheat cakes were a fixture of the American winter breakfast through the nineteenth century, when the usual method was a batter set overnight with yeast or a saved portion of the previous day's sponge, sour and faintly alcoholic by morning. The version here belongs to the later chemical-leavening era: baking powder, five minutes of whisking, and cakes on the table in a quarter of an hour. Buckwheat itself is not a wheat or a grass at all but the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a fast-growing plant long valued in the northern United States and in Russia, Brittany and Japan because it tolerates poor, acid soil and a short season. The maple syrup at the end is firmly northeastern.