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Bannocks, Scotch
Take some oatmeal, add a pinch of salt and a little carbonate of soda, mix into a stiff dough with milk or water, roll out into thin cakes, and bake on a hot griddle until they are of a light brown on both sides. If a griddle is not available take a slide out of the oven, place it on the top of the stove, and bake the cakes on it. Probable cost per dozen, 5d.
A skeleton recipe of the kind Victorian cookery dictionaries printed for cooks who already knew the dish. The proportions are left to judgement, so the useful information is in the handling.
- Working quantitiesThe original gives none. As a modern starting point for a dozen small bannocks, about 1 lb (roughly 3 cups) medium oatmeal, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda, then add liquid a little at a time until the dough just holds. Oatmeal absorbs unevenly, so the liquid figure cannot be fixed in advance.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is ordinary baking soda. With no acid in the mix it does little leavening; its real job is to soften the oatmeal slightly and encourage browning. Buttermilk in place of the milk will actually activate it.
- Oatmeal, not oatsNineteenth-century oatmeal means stone-ground meal, medium or fine, not rolled flakes. Rolled oats will not form a workable dough here; use medium oatmeal, or pinhead oats ground briefly, and give the dough ten minutes to hydrate before rolling.
- The hinge: a dry, moderate girdleThe griddle should be hot but not fierce, ungreased, and dusted with dry oatmeal rather than flour. Too hot and the outside colours before the centre cooks; too cool and the cake dries out grey. Two to three minutes a side is usual.
- Rolling thinRoll on a board dusted with oatmeal to about 1/8 inch. The dough is short and crumbly with no gluten to hold it, so work with a small piece at a time and patch cracks by pressing rather than re-rolling.
- Oven slideThe "slide" is the flat iron shelf from a range oven, used as an improvised griddle plate. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or a flat cast-iron griddle does the same job on a modern hob; a baking sheet is too thin and will buckle.
- Finishing and keepingTraditionally the cooked bannocks were stood on edge before the fire to dry out and crisp; a few minutes in a 300F oven achieves this. Cool completely and they keep a week in a tin, though they soften quickly in damp air.
- Cost noteFivepence a dozen is pre-decimal currency and reflects late-Victorian oatmeal prices; it is of historical interest only.
Bannock is an old word for a round, flat cake baked on a girdle rather than in an oven, and in Scotland it belonged to oatmeal long before wheat flour was cheap or common there. Oats tolerate cool wet summers that defeat wheat, which is why oatmeal remained the staple grain of much of Scotland and northern England into the nineteenth century, and why the girdle -- a flat iron plate hung over the fire -- mattered more than an oven in ordinary households. Bannocks were understood as everyday bread rather than a treat: cheap and quick. The addition of carbonate of soda is a Victorian touch; older bannocks were simply meal, water and salt, and the soda arrives only once chemical leaveners became a household grocery in the middle of the century.