Buckwheat Pumpkin Slapjacks with Treacle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving

1820

Buckwheat Pumpkin Slapjacks with Treacle, The Saison.

In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, food is not just backdrop, it is the very substance of Ichabod Crane’s undoing.

Washington Irving’s 1820 tale, beloved for its spectral ambiguity and autumnal unease, is at heart a story of appetite: for land, for status, for flesh, and above all, for food. If the Headless Horseman embodies dread, then the Van Tassel harvest table represents its opposite—overflowing comfort, domestic security, a sensual promise just out of reach.

Irving, ever the connoisseur of the picturesque, catalogs the Van Tassels’ feast with almost Biblical attention: roasted fowls, shad and eels, smoked ham, “sliced beef, and garnished dishes of preserved plums and peaches and pears and quinces.” He names “doughnuts, crullers, and crisp and crumbling cruller-cakes,” platters of shortcake, and of course—"the drowsy influence of pumpkin pie." One could argue that the ghost of gluttony is more present than the ghost of the Hessian soldier.

The scene draws from a real cultural moment: early 19th-century Dutch-settled New York, where food was both a badge of prosperity and a lingering inheritance of Old World agrarian rhythms. These were tables laid with purpose, where each preserved plum or slab of ham stood as proof of labor, luck, and lineage. For Ichabod, a schoolmaster of uncertain means and unsteady footing, this table represented a kind of final exam—one he failed not for want of appetite, but because he mistook consumption for conquest.

Irving’s genius lies in how subtly the sensory becomes spectral. As Ichabod rides home through the dark, stuffed full of Van Tassel hospitality, it is not just fear that grips him—it is indigestion, both literal and social. The dream of plenty curdles into nightmare. The laughter behind the laden table gives way to galloping hooves. And so the story ends not in marriage or advancement, but in disappearance. The feast is over. The table is cleared.

But we, unlike Ichabod, may still sit and savor—mindful, perhaps, that every warm bite carries its own faint shadow. In homage to the story’s dusky, Dutch-American larder, we turn to the griddle: buckwheat and pumpkin, two staples of the colonial pantry, combined into rustic slapjacks, crisp at the edge and soft at the center. A trickle of treacle summons the sweetness of the past, tinged just slightly with dread.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup of salted pepitas

• 1 cup of buckwheat flour

• 1 cup of pumpkin puree

• 2 large eggs

• 1 cup of milk

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 2 tablespoons of treacle

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice

Directions

1. Heat a large pan over medium-low heat.

2. Sift together the dry ingredients — flour, salt, baking soda, and pumpkin pie spice — in a large bowl.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together pumpkin puree, eggs, milk, oil, treacle, vanilla extract, and lemon juice.

4. Add the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and stir to combine.

5. Add 1/4 of batter to the pan for each slapjack, but don’t crowd the pan. You’ll work in batches.

6. Griddle on one side for about 3 minutes, bubbles will not form on top as for regular pancakes. Flip and cook the other side for 1-2 minutes.

7. Remove from the pan and keep warm as you continue to make flapjacks.

8. Plate, add butter, drizzle with treacle, and sprinkle with pepitas.

Makes 9-12 pancakes.