Buckwheat Pancakes: All You Can Eat

Ohiopyle, a little town nestled in what we in Southwestern Pennsylvania like to call the mountains, is home to a state park with a scenic waterfall. By way of recreation, it has a lot to offer. There is white water rafting, kayaking, and canoeing on the Youghiogheny River. There are several nature trails and a variety of guided walks. There is a twenty-seven mile bike path running east along the river to the town of Youghiogheny and west to Connellsville. It is a short drive to Falling Water, the Kaufmann home designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Kentuck Knob, another Wright design. And next weekend, vendors of crafts and baked goods, candy corn and antiques will line one of the town's two main streets as the local fire department hosts the spring edition of their semi-annual Buckwheat Pancake Festival fund raiser.

Eight dollars per adult will get you two sausage patties, sweet pickles, apple sauce, home-fried potatoes, and all the buckwheat pancakes you can eat. Diners pay at the entrance and then wait on line to be seated at long folding tables when space becomes available. Pickles, apple sauce, and potatoes are served family-style. Pancakes and sausages are served by local teen volunteers. Sausages come once; pancakes will keep coming as fast as they can be eaten. There are even pancakes of the more common persuasion for those with buckwheat phobia.

Buckwheat is a grain once widely grown in the Northeast as feed for livestock. It was also milled into flour and used as a staple in the wintertime. These days, though grown less often, it is generally used to make buckwheat pancakes in places like Western Pennsylvania. To me, buckwheat once meant something quite different. Among my own forbears, Eastern European immigrants settled in New York City, it is more likely to be recognized as the coarse brown groats mixed with bowtie noodles in the ethnic favorite kasha varnishkes or the dry brown stuffing you could have found in Mrs. Stahl's kasha knishes in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Pancakes, as far as I am concerned, are white fluffy things. They have as much to do with buckwheat as mayonnaise does with pastrami.

Article Author: Jack Goodstein

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