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Scotch Oatmeal Cakes
For oaten cakes, take some meal, mix with it a little salt and melted suet and sufficient water to work it into a thick dough, roll out into a cake as thin as possible, divide into quarters, and spread out on the "girdle" (a flat circular piece of iron about eighteen inches in diameter, suspended over the fire), and bake each side in turn. The cakes must then be toasted before the fire till they are curled and crisp. They must be crisp and brittle to be palatable.
A bare-bones formula of the sort that assumed the cook had made oatcakes since childhood. The quantities are left to judgement, so work by feel and keep the dough stiff.
- Proportions to start fromThe recipe leaves all quantities to judgement. For a workable batch use about 8 oz (225 g) medium oatmeal, half a teaspoon of salt, 1 oz (30 g) melted suet or butter, and roughly 4-5 fl oz hot water added a little at a time. That gives about two rounds, each divided into quarters.
- Meal, not rolled oats"Meal" here is stoneground oatmeal ground from the groat, sold as medium or fine; pinhead oatmeal is the cut grain and is coarser again. Rolled porridge oats have been steamed and flattened and bind poorly into a rollable dough; blitzing them briefly in a food processor is a passable substitute.
- Use boiling waterUse hot water -- The recipe says only "water", but hot water is what makes the dough manageable: hot water and melted fat together swell the starch enough to hold the dough while you roll it, and oatmeal has no gluten, so cold water tends to give a mixture that crumbles under the pin. Mix, then let it stand a couple of minutes before rolling.
- The girdleA girdle is a girdle-plate or griddle — the Scots spelling of the same word. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or a flat bakestone over moderate heat does the same job; no fat in the pan. Rolling on a surface dusted with dry oatmeal rather than flour keeps the character right.
- SuetShredded beef suet, or the vegetable suet sold in the same boxes, melted before it goes in. Butter, lard or dripping all work; the fat is there for shortness and keeping, and a little goes a long way.
- Rolling thin"As thin as possible" means about 1/8 inch (3 mm) or less. Thick oatcakes stay leathery in the middle however long you toast them.
- The two-stage bakeGriddling sets the cake, then the drying-out in front of the fire is what makes it snap. Modern equivalent: griddle a few minutes a side until speckled and dry-looking, then finish in a 300F (150C) oven for 10-15 minutes until they curl slightly at the edges and break cleanly.
- KeepingCool them on a rack, absolutely dry, then store airtight. They go soft in a day in a humid kitchen; five minutes in a low oven crisps them again.
Oatcakes are the plain bread of a country where oats ripened and wheat generally did not, and they were baked on a girdle rather than in an oven because rural Scottish kitchens commonly had a hearth and, it is often said, no oven at all. The girdle described here rom a swey or chain over the fire — was widely used across Scotland and northern England, and the same tool produced scones, bannocks and drop pancakes. The two-stage method, griddle then toast, is what gives an oatcake its brittleness and its long keeping, which mattered when a batch had to last a household a week or be carried to the fields.