Wheatcakes Were A Breakfast Staple Long Before Modern Pancakes

Pancakes have been a go-to breakfast favorite for generations, but there was once a much heartier dish served to hungry and bleary-eyed folks in the morning. It was loved by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and even Spider-Man, who's Aunt May would fill the webbed one up with before his adventures. They're called wheatcakes. Unlike modern pancakes, these tended to be made with a combination of buckwheat flour and whole wheat flour (some mid-19th century recipes instead called for cornmeal), and were often sweetened with molasses, all making for an earthier, heartier dish.

Buckwheat isn't actually wheat, but rather a seed from a cousin of rhubarb and sorrel, which has a nutty flavor. The wheatcakes's likeliest antecedent are buckwheat crepes from Brittany, in France, which have a history stretching back to the Middle Ages, with the first written recipe appearing in a 14th century cookbook. In the United States, buckwheat cakes (made without whole wheat) have been a staple dish in West Virginia since the mid-19th century, predating its statehood. However, like most food history, things can be complicated, especially when it comes to pancake-related terminology. There are a lot of names for the same or similar dishes, depending on the geographical area, and wheatcakes are no exception.

The wheatcake story is complicated. The problem stems from the word having been used interchangeably with buckwheat pancakes or as simply another name for a regular pancake. Going to Merriam-Webster's dictionary complicates things further; it lists wheatcakes as simply pancakes made with wheat flour. It may all stem from the fact that, long before you could get your fluffy stack of pancakes at IHOP, fried cakes made using wheat were consumed by Ancient Greeks and Romans and even further back into prehistory. The preserved 5,300-year-old body of Otzi the Iceman, discovered in the Alps in 1991, contained evidence of a last meal that included a pancake-like dish.

With all that history and all kinds of spin-off dishes, such as hoecakes made with cornmeal (George Washington's favorite breakfast) or flannel cakes made with beaten egg whites, it's easy for things to get a little messy. To be clear, we're talking about the wheatcakes that combined wheat and buckwheat into a dish the likes of Charlie Chaplin loved to tuck into: A hearty, earthy, nutty breakfast staple that got the Little Tramp up and at 'em.