Home › Hot Griddle Cakes › Buckwheat Cakes
Buckwheat Cakes
To four cupfuls of pure buckwheat flour, add one cupful of yellow Indian meal and a tablespoonful of salt. Mix one cupful of cold milk with three cupfuls of hot water, making the mixture lukewarm. Add the liquid slowly to the dry ingredients so as to prevent lumps. When the batter is all mixed smoothly, add a melted yeast cake and beat it as vigorously as possible for at least seven minutes. These cakes should be set in an earthen buckwheat pail with a tin cover and a spout, capped with tin. Put them to rise about seven o'clock in the evening. Let them stand in some warm place. Just before baking them, mix a half teaspoonful of soda in a cupful of warm milk and beat this into the batter. The cakes should foam up in great bubbles after adding the soda. Have a little beef suet tried out, and a "swab" with which to grease the griddle. Be careful to make the cakes perfect circles; it makes a great deal of difference in their appearance on the table. A round griddle is the best shape. It should be of polished iron, so that it is easily cleaned. Do not use a particle of molasses in buckwheat cakes. No cakes made with water alone are as tender as when some milk is used.
An overnight yeast-raised buckwheat batter, the standard American breakfast cake before self-rising pancake mixes displaced it. The method is sound; only the equipment and the yeast need translating.
- The hinge: the soda goes in lastThe overnight ferment turns the batter distinctly sour, and the half teaspoon of soda beaten in just before baking neutralizes that acid and gives the lift. Add it immediately before the first cake goes on the griddle — wait and the foam collapses.
- Yeast cake to modern yeastYeast cakes of this period varied: some were compressed fresh cakes (the familiar modern one is 0.6 oz), others dry cakes of hop and meal that had to be dissolved, which is likely what 'melted' means here. About 1 teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast is a reasonable substitute for the whole batch; a full packet risks fermenting too fast and too sour over twelve hours.
- Indian mealCornmeal, specifically yellow. Buckwheat has no gluten of its own, and the cornmeal plausibly contributes a little sweetness and body.
- The buckwheat pailA glazed earthenware crock with a lidded pouring spout, kept for this purpose alone; some households reserved a little of the old batter in it as a starter for the next night, though this recipe starts fresh with a yeast cake. Any large bowl with a loose cover works, but leave the batter room to double.
- "Some warm place"Set at seven in the evening, the batter has roughly twelve hours to breakfast. A cool room suits a rise that long; a modern kitchen at 75F or more will likely over-ferment it, so refrigerate after the first few hours if your room is warm.
- SaltA full tablespoon in four cups of flour is heavy by present taste and will also slow the yeast. Two teaspoons is closer to modern seasoning.
- Greasing the griddle"Tried out" beef suet is suet rendered to clear fat; the swab would have been a cloth or rag, often tied to a stick. Clarified butter or a neutral oil applied with a folded paper towel does the same work. Cook over a steady medium-high heat and turn once, when the bubbles on top break and stay open.
- YieldFour cups of buckwheat plus a cup of cornmeal makes a large family batch, on the order of three dozen four-inch cakes. Halve it for two or three people.
- Why no molassesThe instruction is deliberate, and pointed: plenty of period buckwheat recipes do call for molasses, usually for colour and browning. This author rejects it and puts the sweetening on the plate, in syrup, not in the batter.
Buckwheat cakes were a cold-weather breakfast in the northern states through the nineteenth century, and the overnight yeast batter is the older form, predating the quick baking-powder pancake. Buckwheat is not a wheat at all but the seed of Fagopyrum, a fast-growing crop that tolerated thin, exhausted soil and was widely grown in New York, Pennsylvania and New England; its flour, being oily, keeps poorly, which is part of why buckwheat cakes were thought of as a winter dish. The dedicated earthen buckwheat pail with its tin-capped spout is an object almost no kitchen has now; where a residue of batter was left in the crock, it soured and helped leaven the next night's mixing. The book's warning against molasses marks it out from the many contemporary recipes that call for it.