Holly Jennings

2014 | No. 94

Old-Fashioned Sour Cakes
In the Buckwheat Belt of West Virginia

 

By Holly Jennings

“Are they baked the way you like them?” asked the waitress, after I’d made some progress on a stack of well-browned, ultra-lacy-edged buckwheat cakes. “Yes, thank you,” I said, smiling. But really I had no idea how to answer. I was too inexperienced as a buckwheat cake eater — the question was outside my frame of reference. Never had a waitress asked me whether any type of pancake was prepared to my liking. And regular pancakes are a nearly unrecognizable relative of buckwheat cakes. When I had almost cleaned my plate, the waitress swung by to ask if I would like more, because in Preston County, West Virginia, buckwheat cakes are always “All U Can Eat.” I would have said yes, if I hadn’t already eaten several cakes earlier that day. These latest were delicious, with a robust earthy-nutty-sour taste.

Three months earlier, when I had called to reserve a room for the Preston County Buckwheat Festival, all the rooms in the small town of Kingwood had already been booked, some of them, I learned, a year in advance, and some people keep a room on permanent hold, unless they call to cancel. The closest room I could find was in the neighboring town of Terra Alta, about ten miles east and 700 feet higher.

Driving from there into Kingwood on the first morning of the festival along Route 7, a narrow ridge road, I could see hilltops, outlined by bright sun, rising above the fog-draped Cheat River valley. On either side of the road, rolling pasture descended, marked by occasional cattle, plastic-wrapped bales of hay, and here and there a house. Sixty years earlier, many of the same fields would have been planted in buckwheat. When I spoke over the phone with Bill Shockey, the county’s Agricultural Extension Agent, he said that in the mid-50s in Preston County 400 to 500 acres had been planted in buckwheat. Not all crops do well in the acidic soil and the short growing season of these mountaintop farmlands, but buckwheat thrives. It’s why the area is called the Buckwheat Belt, Shockey said. Today, however, hardly any buckwheat is grown here. “Once the mills in the area began to close in the sixties and seventies,” Shockey said, “buckwheat began its steady decline in the field. There is one mill left in the county, but it only operates seasonally. And most of their buckwheat comes from out of state.”

The main reason the local mills went belly up was a lack of economy of scale; they couldn’t compete with the large industrial milling companies. Government policy also had a hand. Charlie Moyers of Eglon Roller Mills in Eglon, West Virginia, said the cost of updating the milling equipment to meet OSHA’s requirements was prohibitive and caused it to cease milling in 2002. Ever since, flour sold under the Eglon label has been ground to its specifications at a larger operation.

But mill closures are only one part of the equation that explains why buckwheat has almost disappeared from fields in West Virginia and throughout the United States. How we do agriculture today is an even bigger reason. Before the advent of modern farming, a main source of fertilizer and soil health as well as weed control was cover crops. Chief among them was buckwheat, which, as a flowering crop that bees go crazy for, had the additional benefit of attracting pollinators. It’s hard to imagine now, but from the time buckwheat arrived in America with the Dutch in 1626 up until about World War II, we were “filthy rich with tons of buckwheat” (to quote miller, farmer, amateur food historian, and buckwheat evangelist Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills in South Carolina). Conventional farming no longer employs cover crops.

The numbers tell the story. At buckwheat’s height in the late 1880s, over a million acres were planted in it; today, according to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, a meager 40,000 acres are left. And during most of the 300-year-plus period when buckwheat was commonly part of the agricultural cycle, buckwheat cakes of varied kinds, such as the still-extant Acadian ploye, were popular, transcending ethnic, geographical, and sometimes socioeconomic boundaries.

Despite buckwheat’s near-disappearance from our fields and tables, it remains a big deal in Preston County and particularly in Kingwood, where the first buckwheat festival was held in 1938. Each year on the last Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of September, from 100,000 to 150,000 festival-goers descend on Kingwood to take in one of three parades, watch the coronation of King Buckwheat and Queen Ceres, and eat buckwheat cakes and whole-hog sausage patties made from pork raised and slaughtered by local high school students.

 

Old-fashioned buckwheat cakes, also called sour cakes, raised cakes, buckwheats, or simply cakes, are slowly fermented with a sour starter and then cooked hot and fast on a griddle. The taste ranges from scarcely sour to strongly acidic. The sour starter is made with buckwheat flour, water, and yeast, wild or commercial. To turn the starter into batter, it’s mixed with brown or granulated sugar or both, baking soda, salt, and water. To this simple six-ingredient combination, some cooks add, according to their family recipe, other ingredients, such as milk or buttermilk or both, evaporated milk, a little all-purpose flour, or molasses. Whatever the details, the result is entirely different in taste, texture, and appearance from modern pancakes made with chemical leaveners.

The cooked cakes are thin, about 1/8- to 3/16-inch thick at the center, with tapering edges. And they are denser than standard pancakes. The underside is lighter in color than the top and slightly tacky, with numerous small holes. The flavor might be best described as modified buckwheat. Yes, the cakes are buckwheaty, but mildly so. The use of very light buckwheat flour, traditional in the region, dials back the pronounced bitterness typically associated with the seed, as does the competing sourness of the fermented starter, a sourness that is held in check by the addition of baking soda.

Though neutralizing some of the batter’s acidity is not the soda’s only function — it also helps to lighten the cakes and make them more tender, and aids in browning — it is its most important. The tendency of buckwheat cake starter to become very sour very quickly has long been noted by recipe writers. In 1838, Mary Randolph in The Virginia Housewife advised cooks to use the starter immediately after it has risen well. Other cookbooks of the period suggest using baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) or its similarly alkaline precursors, salaeratus and pearl-ash, to counter the sharpness of acidic buckwheat starter. In the anonymous 1830 cookbook The Cook Not Mad, pearl-ash is used as a matter of course. Often, however, 19th-century cookbook authors recommend it only when needed to solve the problem of batter “found to be sour in the morning.” Eliza Leslie, in her 1840 Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches, also notes that pearl-ash will lighten the cakes — a large plus for naturally gluten-free, rising-challenged buckwheat flour. (Though the small seeds of the buckwheat plant, once hulled and ground into flour, behave like grain, buckwheat is actually a herbaceous plant related to rhubarb, sorrel, and dock and is completely devoid of the proteins that enable wheat-flour baked goods to achieve loft.)

 

After I’d spent four days eating buckwheat cakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and chatting with batter masters, fundraiser volunteers, restaurant cooks, and waitresses in and around Kingwood, I learned what the recipes on the back of buckwheat flour bags don’t tell you: that mastering buckwheat cakes takes patience and practice and that there are nearly as many variations on the recipe and as many ways of serving them as there are people making and eating them.

Although the buckwheat cake dinners at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department, sponsor of the festival, draw the biggest crowds — more than 8,000 people in 2013 — you can also eat cakes at other fire departments in the area as well as churches and restaurants. During the festival, I discovered at least 16 different buckwheat cake options, but time and capacity limited me to just ten. My first stop was the United Methodist Church in Masontown, a village about 11 miles west of Kingwood. No GPS was needed. From half a mile away, the road was lined with large signs announcing “Buckwheat Cake Dinners Ahead” and distance markers with fluorescent orange letters.

During a pre-festival telephone chat, Raymond Strahin, a seasoned batter master, had advised me to sample as many different cakes as I could. Normally he makes the batter just at the Reedsville Volunteer Fire Department, but this year Masontown was short of hands, so he was helping out in the batter room there, too. He suggested I arrive at Masontown between mealtimes, so he would have time to talk.

When I arrived at the off hour of 10:30 a.m., the brightly lit dining hall was nearly half full. Strahin, a slightly built man with a white apron and an engaging smile, joined me at one of the communal folding tables. After presenting me with a gift of self-rising buckwheat-cake mix, he beckoned two other lifelong volunteers, Alice and Dwaine McKinney, to the table.

The three gave me a good preliminary education, beginning with terminology. If buckwheat cakes are served with sausage patties and/or sausage gravy, which they almost always are, the meal is called a “buckwheat cake dinner” regardless of the time of day. And though cooked on a hot griddle — not in an oven — buckwheat cakes are always referred to as “baked” and not “cooked.” The McKinneys and Strahin, in their fifties and sixties, told me that they grew up eating buckwheat cakes: Strahin and Dwaine McKinney nearly every morning, Alice McKinney weekly. But only during fall and winter. “When it gets warm, most people stop eating them,” Alice said. Like most buckwheat cake eaters in the region, they like their cakes with syrup (maple or imitation) or sausage or both, and the sausage may be in patty or gravy form or both. Strahin sometimes eats his cakes topped with a fried egg. Other popular accompaniments are apple sauce and apple butter. Less common are jam, jelly, and honey. During hunting season, squirrel gravy is traditional.

Strahin showed me the griddle room, where I watched a baker run a piece of pork fat across the surface of the griddle leaving a film of grease. Beyond was the batter room, where six 10- to 20-gallon crocks of fermenting starter, from two to three days old, were lined up on the floor in chronological order. Over the course of the festival, the crocks would be emptied and replenished to serve a total of 4,000 dinners. When the oldest crock is nearly empty, Strahin moves it to the beginning of the rotation and uses the starter remaining in it to begin a fresh batch. “That gives you good flavor,” he stressed. I spotted a large motorized tool unlike anything I’d ever seen before in a kitchen. To mix large quantities of starter, batter masters employ a paint mixer attached to a power drill.

The Methodist church uses buckwheat flour from Eglon Roller Mills, Strahin told me, while the Reedsville Volunteer Fire Department uses Star Mills buckwheat flour from the Hazelton Milling Co. These two brands along with Preston County Old-Fashioned Buckwheat Flour from Marrara Brothers are milled in the Preston County style, whose color is exceedingly light, with all or nearly all the bran and hulls sifted out. The hull is the dark brown or black exterior shell that protects the kernel; the bran is the light brown or yellowish hard outer layer of the kernel. The somewhat sharp flavor of the hull is up front and assertive; the more hull there is, the more it dominates the taste, giving the rustic and pleasantly bitter flavor associated with buckwheat. The bran provides a strong nutty flavor. When most of the hulls and bran are removed, the flour is very mild, with a detectable nutty flavor and very little or no bitterness. Eglon and the Marrara Brothers’ flours are roller-milled in New York State, while Hazelton flour is stone-ground at the county’s last operating mill. Eglon and the Marrara Brothers flours are very light; Hazelton shows a small amount of dark flecks of buckwheat hull.

 

At 11:30 the early lunch crowd began to file in, and Strahin had to give his full attention to the batter. He follows his mother’s recipe, which includes putting in the starter a small amount of all-purpose flour and adding to the batter some evaporated milk, brown sugar, buttermilk, and baking powder. The all-purpose flour surprised me. Although later I found a few Preston County recipes that call for a little wheat flour, at that point all the published buckwheat cake recipes from the region I’d seen called for 100 percent buckwheat flour. The tendency to use all or nearly all buckwheat flour distinguishes the cakes of this region from those that used to be common in other parts of the country where, as the food historian Sandy Oliver has noted, most risen buckwheat cakes were made with either cornmeal or wheat flour, often in a 1:3 ratio to buckwheat flour.

Before I left the batter room to join the dinner line, Strahin lifted the cloth that was covering one of the older crocks. “When you see the purple dome,” he said, “that’s when you know the yeast is really active and it’s ready to use.” The starter showed a barely perceptible light purple cast. Long afterward, when I had returned home and was experimenting with starters, I would learn that the mysterious purplish-pink color is a sign of wild yeast. (Strahin uses commercial yeast to begin the starter, but time and the addition of mature starter encourage wild yeast to develop.)

An $8 ticket let me into the church dining room and entitled me to a bottomless cup of coffee, an initial stack of three cakes (and then as many more as I liked), and two substantial patties of sausage along with sausage gravy and/or apple sauce. My focus was on the cakes: they were thinnish, lightly browned outside, a little darker inside than a regular pancake, and almost chewy — in a good sort of way. Unlike typical modern pancakes, there was nothing fluffy or cakelike about them. They had a sour twang and, in the center on top, a signature dark brown spot about the size of a quarter. The sausage, though well-done to a fault, added a complementary salty, slightly peppery, and savory note to the plate, and was typical of the region: a classic American breakfast sausage made with the whole hog.

Before I left, I told Strahin that after I returned home I looked forward to experimenting with a starter myself. He seemed a little surprised by that, something I encountered again during the next few days when I mentioned making my own. I realized that Prestonians do not suppose anyone from outside the Buckwheat Belt would be interested in eating old-fashioned buckwheat cakes, let alone bothering to make them from scratch.

 

I arrived at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department in time to help out in the kitchen during the afternoon shift and to spend some time quizzing one of the batter masters, Jim Wilson, who has helped in the batter room since the late 1960s. There a sign placed strategically over the door reads: “Buckwheat Pride — quality control room — No Bad Cakes!” Wilson shared the recipe for KVFD buckwheat cakes with me. Along with Hazelton flour, he adds buttermilk, brown sugar, and a little sweet milk — none of which are in the official recipe on the festival website. When rotating the crocks, he makes a new batch completely from scratch, using active dry yeast. During four days, he said, Kingwood makes 200 crocks of batter weighing 80 pounds apiece, which translates to 100,000 cakes. Wilson saw me eyeing the paint mixer-cum-starter mixer. “We often burn out drills making batter during the festival,” he said. “That’s how great our volume is.”

I was immediately put to work in front of a 450-degree griddle, and I was glad to be in long sleeves. Other volunteers with bare arms were offered special protective sleeves. When a line of buckwheat eaters formed, the volunteers behind the griddle picked up the pace, falling into a choreographed sequence — grease, pour, flip — grease, pour, flip. Taking a piece of fatback skewered on a long-handled meat fork, the first volunteer pressed the fat with not a little force across the surface of the griddle, which immediately released puffs of dark smoke. Before the greaser got to the end of the large griddle, a second volunteer had already begun to pour the batter to make roughly eight-inch cakes, six across and three down. A third volunteer was poised, spatula in hand. The first cakes were ready to be flipped even before the last were poured.

After a couple of hours of hot work, I had to leave for a late afternoon appointment with Tom McConnell, the program leader of the West Virginia Small Farm Center and the county’s Agricultural Extension Agent before Bill Shockey. Down the hill at Becky’s Café, the only restaurant in Kingwood that serves buckwheat cakes year-round, it was easy to spot McConnell in the dining room. He was the only customer. “Everyone must be at the festival,” the waitress commented.

I placed a map of Preston County on the table so that McConnell could draw the borders of the Buckwheat Belt. He drew a zigzag line up the middle of Preston County, saying that the Buckwheat Belt is more heavily concentrated in the eastern half of the county, except for a top bit that juts west to the community of Pisgah. The rest of the Buckwheat Belt extends east into neighboring Garrett County, Maryland, and north into Fayette County, Pennsylvania, areas that have a topography and climate similar to those of Preston County. Buckwheat, McConnell explained, was historically important in these mountaintop farming areas as an insurance crop. If a late spring frost ruined your plantings of oats or corn, you were guaranteed a crop with buckwheat, since it takes just 70 days from planting to harvest.

My order of buckwheat cakes arrived. They tasted very sour, almost as if vinegar had been added. I asked McConnell if he would take a bite. “Yep,” he said, “those are ripe,” nodding his head in approval.

Christy Lott, the cook at Becky’s, does not make her batter from scratch with yeast. Instead, she uses one of the locally packaged buckwheat cake mixes. She grew up eating buckwheat cakes every Saturday and Sunday year-round. Her grandmother and mother made them “real sour.” She knows that not everyone likes them that way, so she usually has three batches going at once: sweet (freshly made), medium-sour (from a few hours to a day old, left at room temperature), and sour (three to four days old, left at room temperature). She suggests that newcomers start with “sweet” cakes and work their way up.

McConnell cleared up my confusion about savory and sweet accompaniments to buckwheat cakes. Around Terra Alta, where he lives, and up toward Cranesville, it’s common to eat the cakes with sausage gravy. When I commented that that would be a very savory meal indeed, he corrected me: “Oh, they have syrup, and they use it. But it goes on top of the gravy.”

 

At the Reedsville Volunteer Fire Department, I ran into Raymond Strahin again. After offering me a piece of the homemade peanut butter fudge sold at the fundraiser, he invited the Reedsville batter master, Dave Broadwater, to join us at one of the cloth-covered tables. At 58, Broadwater has eaten a lot of buckwheat cakes. From September until April, his mother made cakes most mornings for breakfast and sometimes again for supper. He could eat 14 or 15 cakes at one sitting. Back then, his favorite way to eat them was with squirrel gravy. “In October, when squirrel season came in,” he said, “I’d go find myself some squirrels and have buckwheat cakes and squirrel gravy.” But whether he eats his cakes with squirrel gravy or more commonly these days with sausage gravy, Broadwater does not combine gravy with syrup. “If I eat ’em with syrup, I just use syrup,” he said emphatically. “If I eat ’em with gravy, it’s just gravy. You don’t mix that stuff.” Strahin concurred.

Reedsville uses the same recipe as Masontown, and as at Masontown some of the starter from one batch is used to begin the next. Yet the cakes were thinner, darker, and more sour. “Sour cakes are the real buckwheat cakes,” Broadwater declared. “If they aren’t sour, I don’t care for them. They need to sit for up to five to seven days. But at about nine or ten days, that’s when they’re really good. We don’t have time to let them set that long during the fundraiser.”

Here again, as at Masontown, the batter masters look for the purple dome. Strahin and Broadwater took me on a kitchen tour so that I could get a good look at the purple dome. This time I could see it clearly, though the color looked more mauve to me. Broadwater judges when the starter is ready only partly by appearance. “One way I can tell the yeast is working is the smell,” he said. “A lot of people say the starter stinks, but I think it’s a good smell. That’s what you want. It’s gotta smell strong or it’s not ready. They won’t have near the taste, and they’ll be heavy.”

 

Melanie’s Family Restaurant in Aurora, West Virginia, in the southeast corner of Preston County, serves buckwheat cakes from fall until spring. When the season starts each September, high demand makes it difficult for Melanie Fisher, the owner of the restaurant, to serve truly sour cakes, even though some customers ask for them. “At this time of year you go through your starter so fast, it doesn’t have time to set,” Fisher said. “Everybody will eat them, then the excitement will sort of die off, and then they’ll start getting sour because not as many people are eating them. So then you have to watch how much you make because they can get too sour. When they get really sour, they smell like rotten feet.”

That day the starter at Melanie’s had sat for about 24 hours, making the cakes barely sour, which appealed to my green palate. So did a rich added dimension of flavor from a complementary ingredient that I would never have been able to guess had Tom McConnell not previously tipped me off: coffee. Melanie’s unusual recipe comes from her husband’s Amish grandmother, who grew up on a farm in Maryland’s Garrett County, and kept a batch of starter going all year long at room temperature. Melanie supposes that the use of coffee came from farming frugality. Not wanting to waste anything, the family used leftover, still-warm coffee to thin the batter instead of the usual water. Other anomalies include Melanie’s addition of buttermilk to the starter rather than the batter and her use of the back of a spoon to thin the center of the cake immediately upon pouring the batter onto the hot griddle. “You don’t want them thick,” she said. “You should be able to read a newspaper through them, that’s what I learned.”

 

At the Fellowsville Volunteer Fire Department in southwest Preston County, the cakes are intentionally mild. “Most of our crowd comes from neighboring counties to the west and south,” said L. Darwin Wolfe, a well-dressed, well-spoken older man. “People who come here know we make less sour cakes, and they prefer them.” He added, “It’s in Kingwood that you get the classic sour cakes.”

Wolfe told me that his father always grew buckwheat, often for hog feed, and during the winter his mother regularly made buckwheat cakes for breakfast, but they weren’t really sour. To this day he prefers sweeter or barely sour cakes, the style that Fellowsville is known for. Though I’d eaten my last buckwheat dinner only a few hours before, I easily gobbled down the nicely browned, mildly sour cakes with the works: two plump whole-hog breakfast sausage patties, sausage gravy, and homemade pancake syrup.

In the kitchen I helped mix up batter alongside Matthew Clark, Wolfe’s son-in-law and the batter master. Clark lets the starter sit for 14 to 20 hours, and when it’s time to make a new batch, he makes it from scratch with active dry yeast. The batter is made with the starter, buttermilk, brown sugar, salt, soda, a touch of all-purpose flour, and water. Through the service window, you could hear the din of lively conversation in the dining hall. Clark told me that people come to the festival from far and wide. “They use the buckwheat festival as a time for family reunions,” he said. “Some people sit out there and talk for hours, catching up.”

Late in the morning on Sunday, the last day of the festival, I returned to the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department to enjoy a plate of cakes. They were quite thin, very brown on top, with a very light-colored, slightly spongy underside. As expected, they had a decided twang, easily offset with a liberal drizzling of syrup.

I was one of the few solitary diners. Most people came in pairs or with families of multiple generations. On my left, Jeff and Renée Stone, a congenial-looking couple in their early sixties, told me they were from the area and grew up eating buckwheat cakes made from starter. They don’t bother to make them for themselves at home because they can get them once a month at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department. “And besides,” Renée said, “the sour smell of the starter will permeate a house. All of your clothes will smell like it.”

Out on the sidewalk, the after-church crowd was thick. Some people were lined up for dinner tickets at the window; others, looking sated, had just come from the Buckwheat Room. It was my last chance to talk with random buckwheat cake eaters before I headed home. Lingering in the sunshine were an uncle and nephew who had traveled from Michigan to attend the festival. The younger man, whose name was William, was eager to talk buckwheat. He told me that his family had moved to Michigan from Preston County, but when he was growing up they returned to the festival every year. His mother would stock up on the local buckwheat flour, and back in Michigan she would make cakes through the fall and winter until the flour ran out.

I asked William whether he preferred the Kingwood cakes to those at the other fundraisers in the area. He replied swiftly, “You have to get them here. These are the true cakes.” His uncle, edging away, had had enough buckwheat talk. William, grinning, slipped in a parting comment: his tally for this year’s festival was nine cakes that day and eleven the day before.

The Buckwheat Grayscale

For years, I thought that buckwheat flour was dark gray, whole-grain, found in the health food aisle, and never used straight up, not without some loft-inducing wheat flour. Then I opened a string-stitched paper sack of Preston County-style buckwheat flour and found the opposite: silky, snowy white flour. Between these two extremes, I’ve learned, there is a range of “light” buckwheat flours, each differing according to milling style, percentage of hull and bran retained, and regional preference.

For Prestonians, only ultralight buckwheat flour will do. According to Charlie Moyers of Eglon Roller Mills, the locals would say that if the buckwheat flour wasn’t white enough, it wouldn’t rise as well. To confirm or debunk this bit of kitchen folklore, I did two sets of three-way tests. I made separate wild yeast and commercial yeast starters using white, light, and dark buckwheat flour.

The locals were right. The lighter the flour, the more yeast activity I saw, and the more sour, more risen, and lighter the cakes were. On the other side of the scale, the starter made with dark whole-grain flour created cakes that were flat, crumbly, and difficult to bake: whatever gluten strands that had begun to form were clearly torn to shreds by the large quantity of bran and particularly of sharp hulls, allowing the gas from the yeast to escape. Conversely, the darker the flour, the more the cakes had the “classic” buckwheat flavor beloved of buckwheat fans. Because I am one of those fans, I found a plate of tri-color buckwheats to be one of the best things going: each bite revealed the full spectrum of taste and texture, from the slight sourness and lighter texture of the Preston County-style cakes to the full-on rustic buckwheat flavor of the dark buckwheat cakes (with the cakes made of light buckwheat flour in between). Not content with the texture of the cakes made with 100-percent dark whole-grain flour, I later retested the dark cakes and found that using a ratio of two-thirds light buckwheat flour to one-third dark greatly improved the texture while maintaining the classic buckwheat punch.

The differences in taste and texture between the cakes made with commercial-yeast starter and wild-yeast starter were small but detectable. The wild-yeast cakes had a cleaner, more subtle taste; the commercial yeast cakes had more assertive sour taste with a faintly unpleasant aftertaste. The wild-yeast cakes were lighter and their edges were crisper. Because the latter is one of my favorite attributes of old-fashioned buckwheat cakes, I don’t mind at all taking the time needed to develop a sourdough starter. But if you’re not ready to commit to a week of starter feedings, then commercial yeast is an excellent starting point.
Here is the recipe for Old-Fashioned Sour West Virginia Buckwheat Cakes.

 

Sources of Buckwheat Flour for Old-fashioned Cakes

“White” Preston County-style buckwheat flour is sold by Eglon Roller Mills (tel 304.735.3761, Sandyamos@sscoop.com); a 1½-pound bag costs $3.99 and a 5-pound bag costs $7.99. Marrara Brothers (tel 304.329.1191, ask for Dominick Marrara Jr.) sells a 5-pound bag for $9.50. Hazelton Milling Company’s flour is sold at stores in Preston County and at fundraisers during the buckwheat festival; prices vary according to the success of the year’s crop. (The white buckwheat flour from Maine, where it’s used to make ployes, doesn’t work in West Virginia-style cakes.)

Light to medium-light buckwheat flour is sold by New Hope Mills in Auburn, New York (tel 315.252.2676, newhopemills.com); two 5-pound bags cost $23.80 and six bags cost $68.25. The Birkett Mills in Penn Yan, New York (tel 315.536.3311, thebirkettmills.com), sells a 2-pound bag of “Pocono Buckwheat Flour” for $4.50. Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina (tel 803.467.4122, ansonmills.com), whose “Rustic Aromatic Buckwheat Flour” is notable for the large amount of clearly visible hulls that create a clean, bright, classic buckwheat flavor, sells a 12-ounce bag for $6.95 and a 10-pound bag for $60.

Keep buckwheat flour in a sealed jar or zip-top bag in the refrigerator for up to two months or in the freezer for up to a year. ●

From issue 94

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