We love our buckwheat pancakes on Sunday mornings, made with locally produced New Hope Mills buckwheat pancake mix.
When I was little, there was only one kind of pancake we ever ate at home: buckwheat. In fact, I was rather shocked to learn that other kids ate tasteless white things and also called them pancakes. Dad was the go-to guy for pancakes in our house. He had a big iron griddle that fit over two burners. He’d whip up some Aunt Jemima buckwheat pancake batter in an old crock that had a spout and pour from that onto the hot griddle. Maybe we’d have bacon or sausage, definitely we would have butter, and when we could afford it, real maple syrup. Back in the ’60′s, the options didn’t include high-fructose corn syrup. Usually it was Vermont Maid for us, which at least had some maple in it.
It had to have been our early-riser Dad’s idea to make up a big picnic breakfast, buckwheat pancake batter and all, and truck it to Green Lakes State Park at eight in the morning! He’d heat up that griddle over charcoal and we’d sit out under the trees eating this huge breakfast… and then there was the endless wait (only one hour, but exactly one hour) before we could go swimming. We’d be all done with our meal and all the swimming and sunning we wanted just about when the park would be really filling up.
One time, Mom went to Albany to see her parents, leaving us in the care of Dad. Whoopie! Buckwheat pancakes for dinner every night! We honestly didn’t know he knew how to make anything else. Boy, were we surprised when he served us pork chops!
I’m reading an old book entitled The Tavern Lamps Are Burning, an anthology put together by Carl Carmer. One of the essays, which I reproduce in full below, made me so nostalgic for “buckwheat cakes” that I had to type the whole thing out just for you. If this little selection doesn’t make you hungry, then you just ate.
The Importance of Buckwheat
From Dirt Roads to Stoneposts by Romeyn Berry. Published by Century House, Watkins Glen, NY, 1949.
No one truly grasps the importance of buckwheat in the life of America until he starts these cold, winter mornings on a slice of dry toast and a cup of black coffee which have been falsely denominated “breakfast”.
On mornings when the snow creaks under foot, when the kitchen windows are solid with frost and when teasing smells from the skillet waft through the chilly halls, I am inspired to suggest that the true symbol of America should be, not the eagle which embellishes our coins and public buildings, but rather a stack of hot buckwheat cakes surrounded cunningly by smoking sausages whose savory juices struggle ever in vain to unite themselves with the maple syrup which drools from the roof of the enticing mound.
I am informed and believe that the principal uses of buckwheat are to sustain the over-worked hen and to round out the winter breakfast of her owner. But possessing no hen and being denied (for a time) the gross pleasures of the breakfast table, it remains for me in monkish denial to get what buckwheat fun I can by jogging around on the dirt roads and watching the stuff grow. And when you aren’t allowed to eat it, the decorative importance of buckwheat is not to be overlooked.
I realize, of course, that no farmer in his right mind plants buckwheat just for looks. Farmers plant buckwheat either because buckwheat is what they want to raise or because – by reason of their own delay or the failure of a previous planting – buckwheat has become the only possible crop. Nevertheless the plants of buckwheat make our hilltops, slopes and valley floors a far lovelier palette than they otherwise would be and the works of the hands give joy to their fellow men from July until the snow flies.
Most crops move along on time and in step with the music of the changing seasons. Corn is planted in New York when it is planted in Massachusetts. It gets into the crib in Vermont just about the same time it reaches the same destination in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. The flowering of the corn follows the seed time thereof, and the harvest the flowering, with the regularity of the stars in their courses. This is by no means true of buckwheat. Buckwheat can be planted most any time the farmer gets around to it and, in some cases, that’s exactly when it is planted. And so in the late summer, from the same hill and at the same time, (if we include buckwheat planted not for grain but to be plowed under) it’s possible to see on adjacent farms the blood-red stubble of the garnered crop on one, the glistening whiteness of the bloom on another and the pale green of the tender seedlings on a third.
A field of buckwheat flowering under the moon on a summer night may constitute beauty of the breath-taking sort, but it is a sight which is most fully appreciated by the person who has supped well and who can look forward with confidence to a hot, substantial breakfast. No one – no man, anyway – ever had beautiful thoughts on an empty stomach.
When the pinch of hunger grips a male person, his buckwheat dreams lead him out of summer nights and into warm, winter-morning kitchens. When I was a boy there used to be a brown, earthen-ware crock that stood back of the kitchen stove from November to April. It housed the buckwheat batter and it smelled to heaven. Those were the days when all boys were sound on the Bible, – however heretical their personal views on arithmetic, geography and spelling – and to me the buckwheat batter pot was another widow’s cruse, for though I never saw anything put into it, a vast number of buckwheat cakes came out of it every morning with no diminution in the family’s visible supply of batter. One took his miracles as a matter of course in the consulship of Grover Cleveland.
A second miracle occurred when, after a brief contact with the hot griddle, the sour corruption of the batter was changed to the inviting fragrance of the golden cake. Then the intelligent co-mingling of the buckwheat cakes, the maple syrup and the sausages followed by the hearty consumption of the same. His little stomach tight with such honest fuel and any boy would walk a mile to school against the fiercest tempest and through the most overwhelming snow drifts.
If our forefathers had been obliged to breakfast in the winter time on a slice of dry toast and a cup of black coffee, the race would not yet have progressed westward beyond the Hudson River. It might have produced an Emerson or two and perhaps a John Greenleaf Whittier – but no axemen or mule skinners. It was buckwheat cakes that laid the forest low, maple syrup crossed the plains and it was hot sausages that pierced the Rockies and drove the covered wagons to the bright Pacific strand.
No eagle is in any way responsible for the glory of America. It was buckwheat cakes that did the business and that fact should be emblazoned on our arms in the manner first suggested. And if our nation ever goes the way of Rome and Nineveh and Tyre- which God forbid – it will be because the people fell into the base practice of starting cold winter mornings on a cup of black coffee and a slice of dry toast and had the effrontery to refer to that sort of thing as “breakfast”.
Recent Comments