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SCOTCH OATMEAL CAKES (another way) (Oat-cake or bannocks should be)
Oat-cake, or bannocks, should be made from meal as fine as can be got, and as newly ground as possible. The meal should be saturated with lukewarm water, and seasoned with as much salt as can be lifted between the finger and thumb for each cake; stir about well, and squeeze through the fingers, adding dry meal until the mass is of the consistency of dough (all this should be done in a basin); then spread some dry meal on the "bake-board," flatten the dough with the knuckles of both hands until nearly the size wanted; smooth and finish with a rolling-pin. Crimp with the thumb all round the edge, but do not cut in any way. It is now ready for the girdle. Now for the "firing," which is of as much importance as the "baking." The fire must be clear, and free from smoke; as a precaution, throw some salt on. The girdle should be of malleable iron, and a quarter of an inch thick, with a bow handle. Heat till salt crackles on it, brush it clean, and put on the bannock. Move it about whilst on its flat, so that it may be equally done. The cakes may be done on the other side the same way; but they are much better to have the other side done before the fire on the toaster: this will give them a beautiful curl, and make them nice and crisp. Then you will have real Scotch oatmeal bannocks.
A three-ingredient dough — oatmeal, water, salt — where nearly everything depends on the meal and the heat. The instructions below fill in what a Victorian Scottish cook would have taken for granted.
- The meal"Meal as fine as can be got" means stone-ground oatmeal, not rolled oats. Fine or medium oatmeal is the right thing; rolled oats hydrate poorly into a dough and tend to give a pasty, flabby cake.
- Work it hot and fastThis is the hinge. Oatmeal has no gluten, so the dough holds together only while it is warm and damp; once it cools it crumbles at the edges. Mix, roll and get it onto the girdle in one continuous movement, and work with one cake's worth at a time.
- Salt"As much as can be lifted between the finger and thumb" is a small pinch — roughly 1/8 teaspoon per cake. The salt thrown on the fire was traditionally held to damp down smoke and soot from an open coal grate; it is not a seasoning step.
- GirdleA girdle is a griddle: a flat iron plate with a hooped handle, hung over the fire. A cast-iron griddle, a heavy skillet or a solid electric hob plate all serve. The salt-crackle test indicates a moderate heat — hot enough to set the cake without scorching it, since there is no fat and no sugar to buffer the heat.
- Thickness and sizeRoll to about 1/8 inch. Bannocks were commonly rolled as a round the size of the girdle and cut into quadrants called farls — this recipe expressly keeps the round whole ("do not cut in any way") and crimps the edge instead, which stops it fraying.
- Finishing before the fireThe second side is dried rather than fried: propped on a toaster in front of the open fire until it curls and crisps. A low oven, 300F, on a rack for 10–15 minutes does the same job, as will a moderate grill watched closely. This drying step is what makes the difference between a soft cake and one that keeps.
- Timing and yieldThe girdle side takes roughly 4-6 minutes, until the surface looks dry and the underside is freckled. The recipe gives no quantities; a pound of oatmeal will make five or six large cakes, depending how thin they are rolled.
- KeepingCooled thoroughly and kept in a tin, oatcakes hold for a couple of weeks. If they soften, refresh in a 300F oven for a few minutes.
Oatcakes are a characteristic Scottish bread, from a country where oats grew reliably and wheat did not, and the girdle over a peat or coal fire stood in for the bread oven. The word bannock is generally traced to a Gaelic borrowing of Latin panicium, a baked thing; it describes the round rather than the ingredient, so there are barley and pease bannocks too. Cassell's, compiled for a late-Victorian English readership, prints this as a regional set-piece and lets the Scottish vocabulary stand untranslated \\ girdle, bake-board, firing \\ which is why the entry reads as much like dictation from a cook as like a recipe. The insistence on newly ground meal is practical rather than sentimental: oats are high in fat and go rancid faster than wheat, a fact that governed how Scottish households bought and stored their staple grain.