Syrup or gravy?
That question confounded retired Roanoke Times photographer Gene Dalton recently when he stopped at the Cavalier Inn in Hillsville and ordered buckwheat pancakes (See biscuitpower’s buckwheat cakes recipe) for breakfast.
As he has all his life, the Southwest Virginia native ordered syrup for his pancakes. But as he paid the clerk on his way out, his journalistic curiosity got the best of him.
Do a lot of people order gravy on buckwheat pancakes? he asked.
Most everybody, she told him.
He was surprised later to find out that I grew up in Galax — nearby Hillsville — eating not syrup, but country gravy, flavored either with bacon or breakfast sausage, on the buckwheat pancakes my dad taught me to love.
These filling, nutty-tasting pastries are also called buckwheat griddle cakes, or more often, simply buckwheat cakes.
The gravy-over-syrup serving method does not hold true all over Appalachia, however.
West Virginians celebrate their love of buckwheat each September in Morgantown at the Preston County Buckwheat Festival. There buckwheat cakes doused in syrup with sausage on the side are the featured dish.
Late in the Great Depression, rural West Virginia and Preston County found economic recovery slow and tedious. Local farmers grew buckwheat, although mainly for animal feed, as an “insurance crop” because of its short growing season and good quality; it was thought that perhaps this grain might spur agricultural economic growth, according ot the festival Web site.
I still sometimes make gravy to go with buckwheat cakes, but I find that it does overwhelm the
flavor of the buckwheat. These days I more often make a quick and easy blueberry sauce and use that sparingly. Because I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, I often serve bacon with this dish. The salt and smoke really balance the sweetness of the sauce.
Besides its nutty taste, buckwheat has a unique sour flavor and smooth, chewy texture that very much reminds me of Ethiopian injera. Injera is the staple bread of Ethiopia and parts of Eritrea and is made of a tiny cultivated grain called teff.
In fact, in color, texture and flavor, injera could easily be mistaken for gigantic buckwheat cakes. Like buckwheat, teff is low in gluten and high in fiber and protien. While it is used much like ground wheat to make baked goods and Japanese soba noodles, buckwheat flour is ground from the triangle-shaped seeds of an herb, unlike wheat and other glutenous grains that are derived from domesticated grasses.
Like teff, buckwheat grows best at high altitudes and has been eaten since ancient times. In Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries, hulled buckwheat is called “groats” or “kasha” is common in sephardic Jewish dishes.
Buckwheat was one of the earliest crops to be domesticated in Asia. It’s earliest use as a food crop was most likely in China 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. It spread through Asia to Europe and was brought to the American colonies in the 1600s.
At its peak in the last half of the 19th century, more than a million acres of buckwheat were grown in the U.S. Historically, the eastern and northern parts of the country, particularly New
York and Pennsylvania, have grown the most buckwheat. In recent decades, production has been greatest in the north central states.Today most buckwheat grown in America is exported to Japan. Buckwheat, a flowering plant, is also grown for the production of honey. Buckwheat honey is dark and nutty in taste. Source: University of Missouri Extension
Tags: Appalachia, buckwheat, country gravy, Hillsville, pancakes, sausage, Virginia, West Virginia
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