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OAT-MEAL CAKES
Take equal parts fine oat-meal and water; mix and pour into a pan about one-third of an inch deep and bake half an hour, or until crisp and slightly brown; or make half an inch thick and bake soft like a johnny-cake; or if the oven is not hot enough to bake, pour it into a frying-pan, cover it and bake it on the top of the stove, dishing it when brown on the bottom. It is not good cold. If any be left, warm it up and it is almost as good as new.
A two-ingredient invalid dish that lives or dies on the grind of the oatmeal and the heat of the oven. Everything else is a matter of thickness.
- "Fine oat-meal" is not rolled oatsThis means oats ground to a meal roughly the texture of coarse flour — closest today to Scottish or Irish pinhead oatmeal ground fine, or oat flour. Rolled oats are unlikely to hydrate into a pourable batter at equal parts water.
- Equal parts is by volumeEqual parts is most likely by volume -- One cup meal to one cup water is the natural reading, though fine oat flour absorbs more than coarse meal, so expect to add water by the spoonful until it flows rather than mounds.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies none, only that the oven be "hot enough to bake." A brisk oven suits the thin, crisp version for the stated half hour; a moderate one suits the half-inch soft version, which should be set through and just coloured, not dried out.
- Johnny-cake as the referenceA johnny-cake here is a soft cornmeal batter cake baked in a pan rather than the griddled kind. The comparison is telling you to expect something soft and moist, not a crisp biscuit.
- The stovetop methodThe recipe offers this only when the oven is not hot enough. A heavy skillet, covered, works because the lid traps steam and cooks the top while the bottom browns; dish it out when the bottom is brown.
- No salt, no leaven — by designNo salt, no leaven -- The recipe calls for nothing but meal and water. A pinch of salt in the batter improves it considerably.
- Yield and servingA cup of meal makes enough for two; spread it thin enough to hit the stated third of an inch, which will take a larger surface than a single small pan. Serve it straight from the pan with milk, cream or a little butter; the recipe is right that it is not good cold.
Oatmeal in a book like Buckeye Cookery (1877) sits at the meeting point of two traditions: the Scottish and northern English oatcake, a staple bread where wheat grew poorly, and the American nineteenth-century conviction that oats were medicinal. Gruels, oatmeal water and thin oat porridges filled the "Food For The Sick" chapters of household manuals because they were cheap, digestible and unlikely to inflame a fever — the same reasoning that put arrowroot, beef tea and barley water on the same pages. Oats were also newly convenient in American kitchens: commercial rolled and cut oats were spreading through the 1870s and 1880s. The instruction to reheat leftovers rather than eat them cold is a practical touch.