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Tasty Tradition

The Inter-Mountain photos by Edgar Kelley Doug Wood cooks up some buckwheat pancakes during the Odd Fellow’s Buckwheat Breakfast at the IOOF lodge on the Saturday before Easter.

ELKINS — There’s a good chance that everyone at one point has tasted a traditional pancake.

The same isn’t true for a buckwheat pancake, though, which is the staple food served at one of the many buckwheat feeds or buckwheat breakfasts held in our region each year.

In many towns across West Virginia, buckwheat breakfasts are held several times a year. The Elkins chapter of the Odd Fellows hosts around eight or nine each calendar year and have already had two to date, including one on the Saturday of Easter weekend when they served more than 125 breakfasts.

“The Odd Fellows started the buckwheat feeds during a time back in the 1970s when they didn’t have any money,” said IOOF treasurer Chuck Spanitz. “They were about ready to close shop up because they didn’t have any resources coming in. So they decided to start these feeds and they have really been what has carried the lodge through the year ever since.”

All buckwheat mixtures, if done the old-fashioned way, call for it to sit overnight and to have a good starter. Spanitz says the Odd Fellows’ cakes definitely have that.

Riley Strawderman adds some sausage to a plate of buckwheat during the Odd Fellow’s Buckwheat Breakfast Saturday at the IOOF lodge.

“They set the mixture on Thursday so it’s ready to go on Saturday,” said Spanitz. “And the starter that we have is probably 30 years old. It has just been carried down from buckwheat feed to buckwheat feed. Either you love buckwheat or you hate it. It’s a love-hate relationship. Pancakes are just bland, where you will get a charge out of buckwheat.”

Like most buckwheat breakfasts, the Odd Fellows make sure to cater to those who haven’t acquired a taste for buckwheat. Besides buckwheat cakes they serve up traditional pancakes, biscuits and gravy, eggs, and sausage. And of course drinks are included with each meal.

But it’s the buckwheat that draws most people out to the feeds. Buckwheat is so popular in West Virginia that one county holds an annual Buckwheat Festival each year. The Preston County Buckwheat Festival is held every fall and is visited by thousands of people from across the state.

The festival first began in 1938 and continues today as buckwheat and other agricultural crops are exhibited. Each year a massive banquet is held during the festival that features none other than buckwheat cakes and sausage.

While traditional pancakes are prepared from a starch-based batter, buckwheat pancakes are made with buckwheat flour. They are lighter than regular pancakes and darker due to buckwheat being darker in color than wheat. They are also lighter and airy in taste than traditional pancakes.

Three different tubs hold the batter for pancakes being made at the Odd Fellow’s Buckwheat Breakfast at the IOOF lodge on the Saturday before Easter. Two of the tubs were traditional mixes, while the other was for buckwheat cakes.

Buckwheat was one of the world’s first domesticated crops and its use is thought to have originated around five or six thousand years ago in Southeast Asia. It spread to other regions of the world from there and was brought to North America in the 1600s.

Today buckwheat is grown in certain parts of the Northeast where the climate is best suited, such as West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and in the higher elevations of New York state.

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