featuring My Mother’s Cookbooks Buckwheat cake, traditional Northern Appalachian / Acadian fare.
After thousands of years of having wheat in their diet, you might think early European settlers to North America expected that to continue in their new home, but they didn’t. Wheat, they knew requires weather and soil conditions not available everywhere, so they brought seeds for a variety of grains with them, including oats, barley and buckwheat. Native corn and corn cake figures large in the traditional menu of our Southern Appalachian kin, but in Northern Appalachia/ Acadia buckwheat was the grain (pseudo) of choice. Buckwheat in pancakes, cakes and ployes1 still feature large in the traditions of Northern Appalachians/ Acadians. My Mother’s Cookbook’s Buckwheat Cake is a great example.
My Dad had few memories of his mother and two of them involved food. The first was her sending him to the river to collect river rocks to place in the family’s barrel of buckwheat flour to keep it from spoiling. His second memory was the taste of her Buckwheat cake. I suspect my Dad’s memory was missing critical information. So I make no claim about the effectiveness of Grandmother’s method for keeping the warm spring days from spoiling her flour.
You see my Grandmother’s life was cut short by septicemia and flu. Blood poisoning from a splinter of wood in her finger, from scrubbing wooden floors left her with heart damage. A bout of flu complicated by the heart problems, 3 years later, her life ended. Florence Marjorie O’Donnell was born 13 April 1899 and died just a few months shy of her 36th birthday, when My Dad was just 10 years old. Florence was the forth child born to Alice Ann Lyons and Maurice Medley O’Donnell she lived, married and died all within the tiny central New Brunswick riverside community of Carroll’s Crossing. Florence’s family roots run deep in New Brunswick and like her New England Planter, Loyalist and Irish progenitors before her, she used Buckwheat to feed her growing family of 5 young boys.
Buckwheat, a commonly used ‘false grain’ (its seeds can be processed in to flour and Groats), came to the Americas in the 1600’s, possibly earlier. Buckwheat had major benefits to European settlers, it is nutritious, has a short growing season and likes nitrogen poor soil. In the early years of the province it could be said the three staples of the New Brunswick diet were buckwheat, molasses and butter. And that is small wonder, they do taste wonderful together…
Buckwheat was once so widespread that almost every farm in New Brunswick, grew a crop of buckwheat.2 Of course in those areas where the soil was poor and the growing season short it was a logical choice. That areas where wheat, oats, hay also grew well, buckwheat was grown for personal consumption proves the role buckwheat played in feeding families. From farmhouse tables to Lumber camps buckwheat was eaten, but it wasn’t sold as much as bartered. The market being limited to citizens of towns and lumber camps since most folks with any farming capacity grew their own. In the mid 1800’s New Brunswick farms produced enough buckwheat1 to provide the equivalent to 250 loaves of bread in pancakes for every man, woman and child in the province. Buckwheat pancakes were eaten several times each week. By the mid 1930’s far fewer were eating buckwheat but in communities where the combination of lumber work, a short growing season and nitrogen poor soil, buckwheat remained staple in many homes including those lining the Miramichi River. It would take until the mid 1950’s for buckwheat to lose its hold on most rural communities.
When my parents married, my Dad did not have access to his mother’s recipes, he had only memories. My Mum’s family did not have a tradition of buckwheat cake, pancakes yes, but not cake. Over the years My Mother hunted up recipes for and made many versions of buckwheat cake. Of course none of her efforts could quite compare with his young boy memory of his mother and the love she put in to her buckwheat cake.
Buckwheat, like many pseudo grains, when milled results in a heavier and darker flour than wheat flour. Cooks quickly learned that using a mix of buckwheat and wheat flour (when it was available) produced lighter baked products. In short they began stretching the wheat flour (which had to be purchased) with the buckwheat which could be grown or acquired thru barter. I suspect this complicated my Mum’s hunt for a suitable buckwheat cake recipe. My Dad was sure his mother used only buckwheat. I suspect my Grandmother used what she had available to her, which during the 1930’s might have included some wheat flour. Eventually, Mum gave up trying to satisfy an impossible task and decided this recipe was the one she would serve her family, and yes it includes wheat flour.
One final point before we look at the recipe, despite her early death Florence managed to engender a strong love for food in her boys. Three of her sons would go on to careers as cooks.
My Mother’s Cookbook’s Buckwheat Cake:
Ingredients:
1 c all purpose flour
1 c Organic buckwheat flour
1/2 c white sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 c whole milk
1 egg
3 Tbsp softened butter or margarine
Method:
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. and grease a 9 ” x 9″ square baking pan.
2) Measure and sift the dry ingredients together into a bowl.
3) Cut in butter/margarine, add milk and egg. mix until incorporated. Do not over beat which will cause the cake to have a tough texture. Bake 30-40 minutes or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Serve with butter and Molasses. Enjoy!
Carroll’s Crossing, Northumberland County, New Brunswick, Canada
The tiny hamlet of Carroll’s Crossing, nestled on the steep banks of the Southwest Miramichi river, was settled by Europeans beginning prior to the first land grant in1809. The grant in the heart of the Northern Appalachian / Acadian region was under the sponsor Ephraim Betts, which included some 60 parcels of land in the Upper Miramichi valley. The area which became Carroll’s Crossing is comprised of a handful of lots granted to Stephen Sutter, Francis Meuse, James Barcley, Widow Rose Smith, Jeremiah Lyons, William Betts and Azor Betts, lots numbered 58 to 64.
It is not as yet clear the extent to which some of these of Grantees engaged their property. Like many early Land grants, the practice of favouring influential and powerful individuals is demonstrated in the number of lots which were quickly sold, or transferred but not developed by the grantee. A case in point is the sale of lot 61, by Widow Rose Smith to Daniel Lyon, son of Jeremiah Lyons which occurred a mere 3 years after it was granted to her. It is important to remember the primary impetus for settlement of Northumberland county was the timber trade. In the period up to the Great Miramichi fire of 1825, the vast stands of virgin timber represented opportunity.
What we can say is that the family of Jeremiah Lyon and later settlers, did remain in the area and were part of its growth into a community which once boasted a school, church and post office as well as stores, a quarry and a blacksmith. Most of the long term residents of Carroll’s Crossing engaged in the timber industry and subsistence farming. The steep side hill land soil is thin, and rocky but many grants had attached islands and river interval lands which although limited use for building structures because of spring flooding, provided rich soil for growing crops and for pasturing animals. Of course the water front lots were also favoured for their river access, for travel and for fishing. In addition to the Atlantic Salmon which was plentiful in the Miramichi River, the river provided a host of wild foods including the iconic Fiddleheads greens.
The arrival of the railway in 1870’s saw the area gain its name, as the story goes Thomas Carroll who along with his wife Elizabeth McKinnon Carroll settled on the land granted to Francis Meuse, objected strongly to losing his land. Apparently, Mr Carroll was somewhat appeased by the authorities deciding to name the community after him. How exactly Thomas Carroll whose Carroll family had settled down river at Howards, NB, came to choose the area to live is unclear, he did have family connections to the area. Thomas Carroll was Great Grandson of Jeremiah Lyons through his Grandmother Dorothy Elizabeth Lyons Kearney, one of Jeremiah’s daughters. There also appears to be connection to some of the Irish settlers to the area in particular the McNamee family. Regardless, the Carroll family would settle, share their name with the community and grow into the prosperous family, farmers and business owners of today.
Footnotes:
- Ployes – a crape like pancake that was eaten in Acadian homes on a daily basis, made with a special variety of buckwheat the small delicious accompaniment to almost any meal, has a lighter colour than the traditional buckwheat pancake. ↩︎
- T.W. Aceson (1993) “New Brunswick agriculture at the end of the colonial period: A Reassessment” Aadiensis XXII 2, page 11. ↩︎
My Mother's Cookbooks 