Over in Williamstown, New Brunswick, in the 1870s, a blue-eyed woman with her hair pulled back walked back and forth so many times from the wood stove to her family’s table that over time she wore a path in the soft, wooden floor. She was cooking pancakes for up to seven sons, one daughter, and her husband—if no guests were served. Buckwheat pancakes with molasses.
Hannah’s sixth son, Joseph Allison Emery, said he grew up on those pancakes as part of a poor farming family who could not afford to eat much meat.
They did, however, have plenty of the three-sided grain call buckwheat. And so did their neighbors in New Brunswick, and so did other pioneering families across the border in Maine.
In the border town of Fort Fairfield, for example, Sam Everett, an English farmer known for his large build and great strength, reportedly ate buckwheat pancakes with eggs or pork every morning for breakfast. He lived into his mid-80s as did his wife, Eunice. Was a moderate diet of buckwheat part of their longevity?
As an adult, Joseph Emery worked for a time on logging drives on the St. John River, a precarious task of hopping from one floating log to another. He then went out to Colorado to visit his brother and help in the mines. He eventually settled in northern Maine, married, raised nine children, and lived into his 90s. He would tell his grandchildren about his childhood days of eating buckwheat pancakes.
From the same plant family as rhubarb, buckwheat can be planted in late spring and harvested before the first frost as the plants mature in 8 to 10 weeks. In poor soil conditions, the grain produces a higher yield than any other grain crop in a cool, moist climate. It can even thrive amongst tree stumps from newly cleared land.
As little as two acres would feed a farming family of four for a year and not even mice could chew through the dark brown shells. Local grist mills ground the seeds into a flour that had more protein and higher amounts of nutrients than the slower growing wheat.
The buckwheat seed hulls were saved from the mills and used for insulating walls in settler homes. The hulls may also have been used to stuff pillows…a practice in some parts of the world to this day.
Many northern farms, settled in the mid to late 1800s, grew more buckwheat on newly turned soil than wheat, oats, or rye. Buckwheat was more dependable for food in uncertain times when store goods were expensive or sparse and growing seasons unpredictable.
In the more northern St. John Valley where Acadians settled decades earlier, Tartary Buckwheat was grown and ground into a light colored flour (with a bitter taste) to make the famous Acadian ployes, eaten as a thin crepe or bread.
The species grown south of the St. John Valley was generally the Common Buckwheat which made a heavier, blue-gray flour with a sweeter taste.
After the local grist mills ceased operation in the 20th Century, the common buckwheat was seldom ground for flour but was still used as a green rotation crop for potatoes. But the memories of its taste and filling features remained in the minds of my parents, Fred and Iris Russell.
One day in 1969 Fred met a salesman who sold him a counter top grist mill from Salt Lake City. Dad grew both wheat and buckwheat that year, harvested the grains, and then had enough of both to grind for wheat breads and buckwheat pancakes all the next year.
About once a month my task was to sort through a bucketful of buckwheat seeds to pick out any stray, small stones. Then Dad set up the mill in the kitchen and ground up coarse wheat for cooked cereal, fine wheat flour for Mom’s baking, and the buckwheat for pancakes. I’d sift the broken hulls out of the flour and then we’d have a meal that next morning of blueberry buckwheat pancakes with New England’s dark, maple syrup.
Years later, I inherited the old mill from my father and found local sources of buckwheat grain to grind. My family did not eat the pancakes nearly as often as Joseph Emery did, but we ate them fairly often, with both our children sifting the flour and mixing the batter.
