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OAT-MEAL CRACKERS
Wet one pint fine oat-meal with one gill water; work it a few minutes with a spoon, until you can make it up into a mass; place on a board well covered with dry oat-meal; make as compact as you can, and roll out carefully to one-sixth of an inch thick, and cut into squares with a knife. Bake in a very slow oven, or merely scald at first; and then let them stand in the oven until they dry out. These are difficult to make up at first, but you soon learn to handle the dough and to watch oven so that they will not scorch. These are excellent for all the purposes of crackers, and if kept dry, or if packed in oat-meal, they will last good for months. This is one form of the Scotch "bannock." A rich addition is two heaping spoonsful of ground dessicated cocoanut.
A two-ingredient oatcake that depends entirely on the grind of the oatmeal and a very low oven. Nothing here is difficult except the handling of the dough, which the original admits.
- Fine oat-meal is not rolled oatsThis means oats ground to a fine meal — closer to Scottish pinhead oats milled fine, or oat flour, than to modern flakes. Rolled oats will not hydrate into a cohesive mass and the crackers will crumble; if that is all you have, grind them in a food processor until sandy.
- A gillHalf a cup. One pint of fine meal to half a cup of water is a very stiff, barely damp dough, which is why the recipe says to work it with a spoon until it comes together.
- "A very slow oven"250–275F. The point is dehydration rather than baking, so the crackers dry through without browning; at 350F the outsides scorch while the centres stay soft.
- "Merely scald at first"Probably means giving them only a brief initial heating rather than a full bake, after which they are left in the cooling oven to dry; the recipe treats it as an alternative to the very slow oven. Either way the essential thing is a long, low finish, until a cracker snaps cleanly when cool.
- Rolling and thicknessOne-sixth of an inch is thin, roughly 4 mm. Keep the board and rolling pin generously dusted with dry meal; this dough has no gluten and will tear rather than stretch, so patch it with the heel of your hand and carry on.
- YieldA pint of meal gives something in the region of two to three dozen two-inch squares, depending on how thin you get them.
- The coconut variation"Dessicated cocoanut" is unsweetened dried shredded coconut, the same product sold today; grind it fine so it does not interfere with rolling. Modern sweetened flake coconut will make a different, softer cracker.
- StorageThey keep as claimed only if they are fully dry. Cool them completely on a rack before they go into a tin, or trapped steam will soften them within a day.
Oatcakes of this kind — meal, water, and a long slow drying — are among the oldest breads of Scotland and northern England, made on a girdle or bakestone long before domestic ovens were common, and the author's identification of them as "one form of the Scotch bannock" reflects a looser nineteenth-century use of that word for almost any flat unleavened cake of meal. Invalid cookery of the period favoured bland, dry, easily kept starches, and oatmeal in particular was thought gentle and strengthening. The remark that they will keep for months packed in dry meal is practical rather than sentimental.