What I would give for a buckwheat cake

I have eaten in Paris, where the waiter brings you a dish you did not order and charges you for one you did. I have eaten in Rome, where they make a soup out of everything that did not get into the soup the day before. I have eaten in Constantinople, and I will say no more about that, because the man who sold it to me may still be alive and I do not wish him to profit by the notice.

And in all that time, in all those countries, nobody offered me a buckwheat cake. Not once. They have never heard of it. You may describe one to a French cook with your hands, and he will nod, and go away, and come back with a thin sad thing rolled round a spoonful of jam, and call it a crêpe, and expect you to be grateful.

A list I made at sea

Somewhere west of Madeira, where they would not let us ashore on account of a cholera we did not have, I sat down and wrote out the things I meant to eat when I got home. It ran to two pages. Fried chicken, Southern style. Hot biscuits. Porterhouse steak. Corn bread. Apple dumplings with real cream. Peach cobbler. And at the top, in large letters, underlined twice: buckwheat cakes, with maple syrup, and butter that has never been within a mile of a goat.

A man can stand a great deal of foreign cooking if he knows there is a buckwheat cake at the end of it. Take away the cake and he will mutiny.

The ship's cook was a good man and he tried. I gave him the receipt as near as I could remember it from my mother's kitchen in Hannibal, where old Aunt Hannah set the batter rising at night on the back of the stove and it was ready, sour and lively, by the morning. He had no buckwheat, which was a disadvantage, and no faith, which was worse. What he made was a cake in the sense that a mule is a horse.

So here is the receipt, written down properly, so that it cannot be lost again on a foreign sea. I have put the yeast in the modern way, out of a paper, because I am told nobody keeps a crock of starter any more. The pilgrims may skip this part; there is nothing in it about the Holy Land.

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We reached New York on the nineteenth of November. I did not stop to look at the city. I went straight to a hotel on Broadway and asked for buckwheat cakes, and the waiter said they did not serve them after eleven. I have been abroad for five months and seen the wonders of the world, and nothing in all of it astonished me so much as that.