“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a family who always went overboard decorating their house for Halloween. Every year it seemed to get more extreme, their lawn decorations veering well past fun and turning sharply into morbid and truly terrifying. The year I was seven, they constructed a headless horseman—a cartoonish stuffed horse mounted by an unsettlingly realistic dummy whose head had been torn off. The stump of a neck was covered in very real-looking blood and gore and the head lay at the feet of the horse, wide-eyed and grimacing—the thought of it haunted me day and night.
In an attempt to ease my terror over the headless horseman, which I had been talking about incessantly since it appeared in mid-September, my dad decided to read me Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” thinking that if I heard how silly the real story was, I might not be so scared. It was during this reading, though, that a new terror presented itself to me—one that was much harder for my parents to control.
Early in Irving’s description of Ichabod Crane, he tells us that Crane likes to pass his time by terrifying the old Dutch wives “with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!” Sensing that it was something to be anxious about, I asked my dad what the sentence meant. My older sister, excited that she knew the answer, pulled out her Simpsons activity book and pointed to a page showing Otto, the bus driver, with a speech bubble rising from his mouth up into the stars, stating that the earth spun at 1,000 miles per hour.
I stayed in bed for the next three days complaining of being dizzy, gripped with nausea and panic. My mom sent her friend, a child psychiatrist, to ask me what was wrong. When I told her, she asked me questions like, “Okay, so does the spinning bother you because you want things to stay in place and stay the same?” No, lady. I want not to be hurtling around through a giant abyss at top speed! Why is that so hard to understand?
For a long time I thought that this personal, world-altering experience was the only reason that I hated Ichabod Crane as much as I did. When I reread the story in high school, though, I realized that, personal feelings and neuroses aside, Ichabod Crane is simply an unlikable character. He is wimpy, opportunistic, and pathologically self-interested—he is so despicable, in fact, that you barely feel a twinge of sadness over his fate at the story’s end.
Nonetheless, I admit that I felt a little bit kindlier toward Ichabod on my second reading for one reason: his insatiable and all-consuming hunger. In the same way that I feel a kindred (if worrisome) connection to Roald Dahl’s greedy Augustus Gloop, who nearly meets his death dunking his face into a chocolate pond, and John Kennedy Toole’s slothful and gluttonous Ignatius J. Reilly, whose love of hot dogs is practically romantic, I understand Ichabod Crane’s ardent love of eating. There is nary a thought that goes through Ichabod’s mind that doesn’t involve food. When he walks by his neighbor’s farm it isn’t livestock that he sees, but rather food:
He pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cozily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages.
Ichabod’s love and longing for Katrina Van Tassel is based solely on the fact that her family eats well. His desire for her is so bound up in hunger that he looks at her as if she herself were a meal—“plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father’s peaches.” It’s creepy. But I kind of get it. In one of my favorite autumnal literary passages, Ichabod is walking by a field of buckwheat and imagines its future as pancakes:
As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odor of the bee-hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.
Buckwheat was a staple of the American diet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its production took a huge hit in the twentieth with the invention of nitrogen fertilizers. These fertilizers made the cultivation of wheat and maize much easier, and buckwheat lost popularity. I had never eaten a buckwheat anything until I was well into adulthood and working at a restaurant that served buckwheat waffles. The taste and texture were a revelation to me.
“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”
Buckwheat Pancakes
This recipe calls for a mix of both white and buckwheat flours. (Despite the name, buckwheat doesn’t contain any wheat and is actually related to rhubarb, sorrel, and knotweed, so if you are gluten intolerant, feel free to sub out the white flour and use all buckwheat; the pancakes may be a little denser but they will still be delicious.) Yogurt lightens the buckwheat’s denseness, and brown butter brings out its nutty earthiness. These pancakes are great served with honey or maple syrup, butter and jelly, peanut butter and bananas, or, for a more savory breakfast, crème fraîche and smoked salmon (I’ve tried them with all of these toppings, for research purposes, of course).
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large eggs, separated
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup plain full-fat Greek yogurt
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¾ cup buckwheat flour
½ cup all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Favorite toppings (see headnote), for serving
Brown 3 tablespoons of the butter and set it aside to cool.
Place the egg yolks in a large bowl. Add the sugar and whisk until the yolks are a creamy light yellow. Add the yogurt, water, vanilla, and browned butter and whisk until combined.
In a separate bowl, whisk together both flours, the baking soda, and the salt. Whisk the dry ingredients into the wet mixture.
In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they reach stiff peaks. (Alternatively, you can do this part in an electric mixer with a whisk attachment.) Gently fold the stiff whites into the batter until they are fully incorporated.
Preheat the oven to 150°F (for keeping the finished pancakes warm while the others cook).
Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a medium skillet (preferably cast-iron) over medium heat and scoop about ¼ cup batter into the pan. Cook until bubbles begin to form all over the pancake, about 3 minutes, flip, and cook until the bottom is crisp and brown, about 3 minutes more. Repeat with the remaining batter, transferring the finished pancakes to the warm oven until all are done. Serve with your favorite toppings.