Eaten in the remote north country of the upper St. John River Valley, a ploye (rhymes with toy) is a pancake made by pouring a circle of thin buckwheat batter onto a hot griddle, cooking it very briefly, and never flipping it. The underside gets crisp while the top stays soft and develops countless little holes that are porous enough to absorb substantial amounts of butter and maple syrup or to sop up the last of the gravy from a plate of pot roast. A well-made ploye looks like an especially elegant crumpet or a crepe. In Maine’s Aroostook County, they are earthy fare and a symbol of cultural identity. They are thought of with great affection as the daily bread of lumberjacks and as ordinary people’s sustenance, traditionally made by farm wives who had minimum resources to feed large families. Acadians use ployes as flatbread, serving stacks of them alongside supper or breakfast. Old-timers eat them spread with cretons, a coarse-ground pork hash sweetened with onions. Ployes are mostly the province of home cooks, but a handful of restaurants along the International Boundary make a point of honoring an Acadian culinary heritage that also includes rappie pie (potato casserole), ham-based boiled dinner, and the much-maligned but occasionally transcendent poutine (fried potatoes and cheese curds smothered with gravy).
Aroostook County, Maine: A stack of ployes, waiting to be buttered or used as a mop for gravy.
A recently invented variation of the ploye is the ployeboy, currently available for only a few days in August when served by the American Legion at the annual Muskie Derby and Ploye Festival in Fort Kent at the end of Route 1 in northernmost Maine. Apparently ployeboys took shape during the 2008 Festival when the American Legion ran out of ingredients to make doughboys and used ployes instead, dipping a soft buckwheat pancake into the fry kettle just long enough for it to curl at the edges and turn crisp. Brushed with butter and then sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar, the soft pancake is transformed into a wavy buckwheat sugar cookie. Each year, the Festival features ploye-eating contests and hosts the creation (and serving) of the world’s largest ploye.