This just in from the The (Va.) Daily Press in Tidewater:

In the beginning, there was ham.

The very first English settlers in Virginia — the original Jamestown colonists — brought pigs with them when they crossed the Atlantic. The first wave in 1607 brought three, historians tell us.

In short order, that trio of oinkers increased to as many as 600 after they were hauled across the river to Hog Island to fend for themselves. “But by the onset of the Starving Time in 1609, all of them had been eaten — some by Indians,” said Jamestown Rediscovery Project Curator Bly Straube.

None of this is news to Sam W. Edwards III. A third-generation Virginia ham producer based in Surry, he’s researched the rich, salty history of ham in Virginia, and will share his knowledge at an event Friday morning in Surry. His talk is titled “The Romance of Virginia Ham: History and Production.”

Edwards’ talk — which will include a short tour of his company’s plant — is being organized by the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends Group. The group is an outgrowth of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection, started in 1999 at the Virginia Tech library.

Read the rest of this story here.

This goes great with buckwheat cakes, or any other kind of pancakes.

Yield: About 1.5 cups

Ingredients: 2 cups frozen or fresh blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt

Instructions: Add all ingredients to a small saucepan and cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the sauce is reduced by a third and is slightly thickened. About halfway through the cooking time, use a potato masher to smash some of the berries into the sauce. You can leave it as chunky or make it as smooth as you like. If you want to get fancy, you can add orange zest or honey about five minutes before it’s done. If you have a real sweet tooth, you can add a 1/4 cup more sugar.

Nutty, light, succulent and slightly sour, these buckwheat cakes are based on the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook’s whole wheat pancake recipe. Read about the great pancake debate.

Yield: About 16 4-inch pancakes, or 8 adult servings

Ingredients: 1 cup plain buckwheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 1/2 cups buttermilk
Butter or light-flavored vegetable oil for the pan

Special equipment: 12-inch nonstick skillet; a large non-metal “fish turner” or “fish spatula” (this is a long, flexible spatula that’s great for delicate or difficult to flip foods like fish and pancakes); a large cookie sheet or pizza pan and a wire cooling rack.

Instructions: Place the wire cooling rack on the cookie sheet or pizza pan, and then put the lot in a warm oven (preheated to about 200 degrees). This is where you will keep cooked pancakes
until you’re ready to serve them.

Whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large mixing bowl. In
a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, melted butter and buttermilk. Make a well in the flour
mixture and pour in the egg mixture. Using a wooden spoon or silicone spatula, mix the wet and
dry ingredients together very gently until you have a lumpy batter with traces of flour still visible. Do not overmix, or your cakes will be tough.

Cooking: Heat your skillet on medium for about 5 minutes, or until a drop of water sizzles when dropped in the pan. A non-stick skillet is really best for frying these cakes. I add a teaspoon or so of butter or oil to the non-stick pan before cooking the first cake. Subsequent cakes don’t
require any oil or butter.

A little lecture on pans: If you don’t have a nonstick skillet, go buy one. It’s an essential kitchen tool for cooking both eggs and pancakes. Wearever makes a cheap but very sophisticated nonstick pan you can get at any discount department store such as Wal-Mart or Target. If you’re broke or just stubborn, you can use a traditional frying pan. You’ll need to oil the pan well before cooking each cake, though. No matter how much oil you use, the first and last cake will stick. Probably several of them will, actually. Just don’t blame me. Remember, I warned you.

Cooking, continued: Pour 1/4 cup batter into the hot pan for each cake. If frying in a 12-inch skillet, you can do two at a time. If you have a smaller skillet, use it. But it will require you to cook only one cake at a time.

Cook on the first side for about 2 minutes, or until large bubbles appear over most of the surface of the cakes. Flip the cakes and cook until golden brown on the second side, about 1 1/2 minutes longer. Spread the pancakes one-layer deep on the wire rack in the oven. Repeat until all the batter is used.

Serve 2 cakes per person with blueberry sauce, syrup, honey or country gravy. Bacon or sausage patties or links are wonderful accompaniments, as is a good, strong cup of coffee or a big glass of cold milk.

Now you can strap yourself to a plow and work on the farm for about four hours.

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

The song of spring is best sung with your mouth full.

Only hearty vegetables grow during this tempestuous time of year. The past month at my local farmer’s market began the ballad of the hardy, cold-loving plants. End of winter foods taste wilder, but their sharp green flavors turn sweet under oil and salt and heat.

Chives, leeks, ramps. Mustard, chard, kale. Lettuce — it’s own red and green category, sweet and succulent, or bitter. They shout at us: stop eating from the bins in the cellar and the Ball jars! Time now to pluck and chew things that are alive!

Old timers in the mountains call these foods tonics, and knew how to scavenge these and more from the woods and hillsides. They are believed to thin the blood and prime the human pumps for planting and harvesting.

For most modern Appalachians, though, spring means the excitement of tossing a salad that wasn’t cut weeks ago in California. It’s the thrill of skipping over the waxed produce aisle, where everything is just a little too perfect, or on the other end of the spectrum, tired and wrinkled at its edges, as I am after a long winter.

A sign at a local farmer’s market stall reminds me that nature has its rhythms, and that patience is rewarded.

“Onions aren’t in season. Use leeks!!”

Also in season: chives, garlic chives, green garlic, and that most pungent of wild herbs, ramps. Don’t believe the hype. Ramps will not chase away friends and lovers. Just cook them before you eat them. They’re particularly tasty in fried potatoes, like hash browns and latkes.

I love the liminality of spring — this between-time time.

Yesterday I turned the compost pile, and last night I added to winter’s chaff the trimmings of new leeks and mustard greens and the stems of fresh rosemary and thyme, all scraped clean. I look into this rotting cauldron and there I can see the future. Soon the bacteria sleeping here will wake to feast on rotten squash and watermelon rinds. The cycle begins again.

Tonight we ate leeks, sweet and browned with roasted potatoes flavored with olive oil and salt and piney, resinous rosemary. The skins hissed when they hit the black iron pan. We tossed a salad of red oak leaf lettuce and spring mustard greens with vinegar and oil. The nights are still cold enough for steak, which we seasoned only with salt.

In the morning we’ll eat ramps and eggs, a mountain favorite this time of year.

“Start slow, they’re strong,” a friend told me about this dish.

Tomorrow night perhaps I’ll use a ramp and morel quiche to chase the early May damp and chill from the house.