Buttermilk-Soaked Buckwheat Pancakes

I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. I get up at dawn and putter about for a few minutes until my hunger wakes up. Then I move with a swiftness. I heat the skillet, toast a slice of homemade bread, and circle back to the skillet to crack in two eggs. The eggs barely make contact with the pan. (Over-easy is the term, but we called them "gook-out" when we were young.) Then the toast pops, and the butter drips down through its chewy holes, and I tuck in. Once my hunger wakes up it's a growling beast.

After dipping my toast in the warm yolks and sliding the whites through the dripped-down melted butter, I can more leisurely turn my attention to things like sauerkraut and tea. It's a splendid breakfast, so splendid that when I make fancy breakfasts for other folks, I still make myself eggs and toast.

Indeed, I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. Except for yesterday. And today. The folks at the farmer's market didn't bring eggs on Wednesday, being too busy with tomatoes. I am such a snob that I just can't tolerate the sight of ordinary commercial eggs anymore, not even the expensive organic omega-3 faux-family-farm eggs. They look flaccid and mucilaginous, not at all muscular and perky and bright like real eggs.

So I went back to an old recipe I was saving for the dark of the year when real hens cease to lay. It's a recipe that was outdated before it was published a century ago. Helen Marsden, the endearingly nostalgic author, bemoans modern methods and the modern fear of inconvenience. But back then, "modern methods" meant baking powder instead of soda. And "inconvenience" was taking the time to soak your batter overnight. These days, breakfast itself is the great inconvenience.

Take heart, though! She assures us that "the setting overnight ... is in fact a very simple and convenient process, consuming only a few minutes and doing its leavening work in accordance with nature's chemistry during the long hours of the night."

It turns out that nature's chemistry is delicious, and truly easy. There's nothing in our modern repertoire quite like these buckwheat cakes. You know the spongey sour Ethiopian flatbread, injera? The cakes are spongey like that, but more delicate on account of the milk, and not sour. Like a cross between crepes and injera. They're tiny little chewy toothsome morsels. She calls it "light nothingness." Yes, that's true, but they're also satisfying -- they fill you up without the midmorning pancake crash. I ate a dozen and they kept me humming till lunch.

Real Buckwheat Cakes

This recipe makes enough pancakes for two hungry people, with maybe a few left over for a third person who generally prefers coffee to breakfast.

The night before, put two cups of buckwheat flour in a large bowl with a cup of sour milk (buttermilk, kefir, whey, or clabber), and a cup of water. Whisk until all the lumps are gone. Add a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of molasses, and whisk in. I think Marsden assumes you're using toasted buckwheat flour (the grey-colored kind, readily available), but I usually prefer freshly ground untoasted buckwheat groats.

Put a tea towel over the bowl, a plate on top to hold it on, and a thick dish towel over the whole thing. Set it somewhere warm. I put it directly on my stovetop over the hot spot from the pilot light. A radiator would also work. It shouldn't be so hot that it hurts to touch -- that would kill the fermenting bacteria.

In the morning, heat a cast iron skillet over a medium-high flame. Don't let it smoke. Add a teaspoon of baking soda to the batter, and whisk it in until it's all bubbly and evenly distributed.

Grease the skillet well (use ghee, lard, or bacon fat -- or butter, if you're careful not to burn it). Marsden says to use a "cooking-spoonful" of batter for each cake. It's not a lot. These are little guys. Put four or five in the skillet.

Flip them when they have bubbles in the middle. Remove when they're brown on the bottom and re-grease the skillet before you put the next round in.

Serve hot with gravy or butter. Or syrup, if you must, but I warned you about the pancake crash.

Hint

Helen Marsden recommends an innovative pan-greasing device: a piece of fat pork stuck on the end of a fork. I suppose I could keep it handy in a little jar on the back of my stove; no more running around for the butter knife between pancakes. In fact, I could even use the fat-pork fork for my ova over-easy.

How to Roll a Crepe

Pick a sunny morning -- the last sunny morning of Indian summer will do -- and make some crepe batter. I whisk together a cup of flour, 4 eggs, and enough milk or water to make a very thin runny batter. I like to add several tablespoons of ground flax meal because it makes a pied-beauty speckling on the undersides of the crepes (and, magically, only the undersides). Then I heat at least two skillets to medium-hot, with a little butter, and go into skillet-slamming wrist-gyrating batter-dribbling pancake mode. The idea is to make a small puddle of batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the pan and swirl it around to spread out the batter. When I saw my Aunt L. first make these, I was completely awestruck. She used a cast iron griddle that left characteristic concentric rings on the bottom of the cakes.

And then she taught me this, which I thought the height of elegance, a trick so deft and dainty as to be just about as much fun as donning her dress-ups:



But of course, you can always roll your crepes like a denim-ripping miscreant:


The denim-ripping miscreant was also responsible for the roast apple-banana-carrot-currant filling. Delicious.

Flattest Pancakes

What my Aunt L. calls "Dutch pancakes" are, it turns out, what the Hungarians call palacsinta: a large thin pancake, slightly sturdier than a crepe but filled with a similarly vast array of sweets & savories. My dough-bespattered heirloom version of the Mennonite cookbook More-with-Less calls them "Grandmother's Russian Pancakes (Pflinzin)" (but I thin that recipe down to make them suit me -- so maybe the real Russian thing is distinct). In good "more-with-less" spirit, I use extra eggs, whole wheat flour and flax meal to bulk up the cakes' nutritional value. I've made these for Saturday breakfasts and Thursday suppers since I was a gal of 12.

Whisk 5 eggs, 1 c. milk, a pint of white whole wheat flour, and 1/4-1/2 c. flax meal to a pourable consistency. Adjust the milk to make it so, and be sure to whisk away all the lumps. Fortunately, this is the sort of batter that can tolerate numerous edits -- and the first few pancakes are for experimental purposes, anyhow.

Heat your cast iron skillet(s) to a nice medium and, if you've been lucky enough to find a friend who gives you homemade ghee, put a teaspoon in the skillet. I'm not usually a fan of moderation in fats, but these pancakes cook better if the fat is minimal (after the first couple, I re-grease between every 3 or 4 cakes). If it's nice & sizzly, get a good mitted grip on your skillet and pour 1/3 cup of batter into the middle with your free hand. Immediately lift the skillet high and tilt & twist it so the batter spreads out into a perfect circle as thin as the batter will go. Tilt it back & forth so the batter's all even, and replace it on the heat. Watch it closely! As soon as the top no longer appears gooey wet, loosen it up and flip it over. It should be perfectly golden at this point -- calibrate your heat accordingly. Give it a bit on the other side, and when it's got golden spots, toss it onto a plate & cover with a tea towel. The whole process takes just a handful of seconds -- which is convenient when the Jehovah's Witnesses come knocking and you need a non-confrontational expedient escape. Repeat until the batter's exhausted, editing with milk and flour as you go (it often gets thicker at the bottom).

Serve the towering mound of pancakes with butter, jams, yogurt, honey, maple syrup, and any savory fillings you may have cooked up (this morning it was a fantastic pork gravy with sage & smoked paprika to make it reminiscent of sausage) (I am so sorry, L. Joy, for being so clattery and noisy in the kitchen when you were sleeping on the living room floor this morning. Thank goodness you have a plush queensized bed of your own now).

Aunt L. taught me this super-elegant trick for eating the pancakes: spread the whole disk with your favorite toppings. Then thread the bottom tine of your fork through the right edge of the cake just like a needle -- in and out -- and deftly twist the handle of your fork so the pancake spins itself up into a tight little roll around the fork. Slide your fork out and cut it into dainty morsels. Some folks stack multiple pancakes with different fillings between each layer, and H. Rose always eats hers like burritos -- with her hands, maple syrup running to her elbows.