the dark, tangy, yeast-risen buckwheat cakes that were the great winter breakfast of the rural American north-east, fermented overnight and griddled tender, stacked with butter and maple syrup
Origin: United States (Pennsylvania and Appalachia)
From the journey of Buckwheat.
Buckwheat crossed the Atlantic with the Dutch, who planted their boekweit along the Hudson in New Netherland, and with the German settlers of Pennsylvania, who knew it as Buchweizen, and on the cool, poor hill soils of New York, Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian uplands it grew where wheat would not. From its dark flour Americans made the buckwheat cake, which for two centuries was the great winter breakfast of the region. What set it apart was its rising: not quick chemical leavening but a yeast or sourdough batter, a portion of which was held back each morning and replenished at night to ferment until dawn, so that the cakes carried a distinctive light, sour, tangy lift. Griddled dark and tender and stacked high with butter and maple syrup or sorghum molasses, they fuelled the farm worker through the cold. As wheat grew cheap the buckwheat cake faded to a regional and heritage food, but it is far from gone: the autumn buckwheat festivals of Kingwood in West Virginia and the Pennsylvania hills still serve them by the thousand.
A sourdough starter in place of the yeast gives the most authentic tang and was the traditional way the 'cake batter' was kept alive through the winter. The proportion of buckwheat can be raised for a darker, more robust cake. Sorghum molasses is the historic Appalachian topping; maple syrup is the New England and New York one.
Mapping Culinary History
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