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Oat-Cake, Made with Yeast
Put a quart of water into a bowl, and mix with it one ounce of dissolved German yeast. Sprinkle three and a half pounds of fine oatmeal into it, stirring it briskly all the time, and when it is smooth and thick, stand the bowl in a warm place, cover the mixture with a cloth, and leave it half an hour to rise. Stir the paste well, spread it out very thin, sprinkle a little oatmeal under and over it, and throw it upon the bakestone, which should be placed over a bright fire; when lightly browned on one side, turn it on the other. The cakes may either be eaten soft, or hung to crisp upon a cord which has been stretched across the kitchen. While the cakes are baking, the dust of the oatmeal should be swept off with a small brush. Time to bake, two minutes. Probable cost, 4d. per dozen.
This is the soft, yeast-risen oatcake of northern England rather than the crisp unleavened Scottish kind, and it is written for a household baking dozens at a time. Scale it down before you start.
- Scale firstThree and a half pounds of oatmeal to a quart of water makes a very large batch; the recipe gives no yield, only a price per dozen, but it is plainly a household quantity. A quarter of the recipe (about 14 oz oatmeal, 10 fl oz water, a scant 1/4 oz fresh yeast) is a sensible domestic amount.
- German yeastFresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in blocks. One ounce is roughly equivalent to 1/3 oz (about 10 g) of instant dried yeast. "Dissolved" presumably means slaked in a little water first; the recipe does not specify the water's temperature, but tepid rather than cold water would help it rise within the stated half hour.
- The quartAn imperial quart, 40 fl oz, or about 1.2 US quarts. Note the ratio: three and a half pounds of meal to 40 fl oz of water is a stiff mixture, and the recipe has you spread the paste rather than pour it.
- Fine oatmealStone-ground fine or medium oatmeal, not rolled oats and not steel-cut pinhead. Rolled oats will not hydrate into the same smooth paste; if that is all you have, grind them first.
- The bakestoneA flat stone or iron plate set over the fire — a heavy cast-iron griddle or a dry, well-seasoned skillet is the direct equivalent. The recipe calls for a bright fire; take the plate to a steady, properly hot heat, or the two-minute bake will not work.
- Spreading it thinThis is the hinge. The batter is thrown and swept out to the thinness of a crêpe on a meal-dusted board or cloth, then flipped onto the stone. A thick cake will be gummy in the middle in two minutes and leathery if you cook it longer.
- Sweeping the dustThe loose oatmeal that falls on the hot plate scorches and smokes, and the burnt grit transfers to the next cake. Brush or wipe the griddle between bakes.
- Soft or crispEaten warm they are soft and pliable, like an oat pancake. Hung to dry — on a rack or over a wooden airer rather than a kitchen cord — they stiffen over a day into a brittle cake that keeps for weeks in a tin.
Oat-cake baked on a hot stone was the everyday bread of the uplands, where oats ripened and wheat did not, and the yeast-raised version is associated above all with the Pennine counties, though leavened oatcakes are also a Staffordshire and Derbyshire tradition — the "havercake" or riddlebread of Yorkshire and Lancashire, thin, sour-tinged and thrown across a bakestone in seconds. The Scottish oatcake most readers know is a different thing: unleavened, cut into farls and dried hard. The detail of hanging the cakes on a cord across the kitchen is the genuine domestic article; northern houses kept a bread creel or a set of rails slung near the ceiling, and the cakes hardened there over a day or two into a keeping bread. Cassell's, compiling for a national middle-class readership in the late nineteenth century, records it with a costing of fourpence a dozen — a reminder that oatmeal was still the cheapest way to put bread on a table, and that this was a regional survival being written down.