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Shrewsbury Buckwheat Cakes

A yeast-leavened buckwheat batter cooked like pancakes, served hot and buttered.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Buckwheat and butter work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Shrewsbury Buckwheat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the yeast with warm water and add the salt.

  2. Stir in enough buckwheat meal to create a thick batter.

  3. Cover the mixture and let it rise in a warm place for 3 to 4 hours until bubbles form on the surface.

Cook and serve

  1. Butter a frying pan and pour a ladleful of batter for each cake.

  2. Cook the cakes like pancakes over a clear fire.

  3. Butter the cakes while hot and serve them stacked on a hot plate, right side up.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Buckwheat + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together213 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brewer's yeast
Ferments the batter, producing bubbles that lighten the cakes as they rise.
Buckwheat meal
Forms the main body of the batter, giving the cakes their earthy flavour and texture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the cakes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Letting the batter rise. The batter needs time for the yeast to ferment and form bubbles on the surface. Rising too briefly leaves the cakes dense, while the batter should be left covered in a warm place until bubbles appear.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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