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Oat-Cake
Oat-cakes, or oatmeal cakes, are very common in Scotland and the North of England. They are eaten with butter or cheese, either toasted or plain. When first made they are quite soft, but after they have been dried before the fire for a few minutes they become crisp and hard. When made in perfection they are as thin as wafers, and are certainly very good eating, though not of a very satisfying nature. They are baked on a "bakestone," which is a kind of thick frying-pan, made of iron or stone. Mix two or three table-spoonfuls of oatmeal with a pinch of salt and a little cold water. Knead it well round and round with the hands for some minutes, then spread it on a pastry-board as thin as possible, and strew meal under and over it. Move to the bakestone, and bake it on both sides over a clear fire. It is well to mix sufficient oatmeal and water for one cake at a time, as the batter soon dries. Time, two or three minutes to bake the cakes. Probable cost, 3d. per dozen.
A two-ingredient flatbread whose success depends almost entirely on how thin you get it and how dry the dough stays. The instructions are brief because there is very little to it beyond handling.
- The hinge: work fast, one cake at a timeOatmeal absorbs water quickly and the dough stiffens within minutes, after which it cracks instead of spreading. Mix, knead and roll a single cake before starting the next, exactly as the original insists.
- Which oatmealThis means dry-milled Scottish or Irish oatmeal — medium or fine grind, not rolled oats and not steel-cut pinhead. Rolled oats will not hold together in a wafer; if that is all you have, blitz them to a coarse flour first.
- QuantitiesTwo or three tablespoons of meal makes one small cake. Water is added by feel: enough for a stiff, just-cohesive dough. Note that the original specifies cold water.
- The bakestoneA girdle or bakestone was a thick flat plate of iron or stone set over the fire; the original calls it 'a kind of thick frying-pan, made of iron or stone'. A dry cast-iron skillet, a flat griddle or a heavy pan works the same way — no fat at all, over medium heat, the original allowing two or three minutes in total for the cake, turned to cook both sides, until pale with brown freckles.
- Rolling thinKeep the board and the top of the dough well dusted with dry meal or the cake sticks and tears. Rolling to the thickness of a coin is the target; a bench scraper helps move the finished disc to the pan intact.
- The drying stepThe cakes come off the pan soft and leathery. Finishing them in a 250–300F oven, or propped in front of a heat source, for five to ten minutes is what makes them snap. This step is not optional if you want the traditional texture.
- Yield and keepingA dozen cakes at two or three tablespoons of meal each takes something under a pound of oatmeal. Once thoroughly dried they keep several weeks in a tin; any softness picked up from the air is driven off with a few minutes in a low oven.
Oatcakes belong to a broad northern European tradition of griddle-baked grain cakes that predates domestic ovens: oats grow where wheat struggles, and oat flour has no gluten to speak of, so the meal was mixed with water and cooked flat on a hot stone or iron plate rather than raised into a loaf. In Scotland and the northern English counties this was everyday bread well into the nineteenth century, and the word bannock for the larger round, with quarters or farls for the cut wedges, is generally traced to a considerably older history than that period. Cassell's does note, with faint condescension, that oatcakes are "not of a very satisfying nature" — and the dish was in any case among the cheapest things a kitchen could produce, at threepence a dozen.