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Good Old-Fashioned Scotch Oat Bread
Take 1 cup standard oatmeal, 1 cup Five Roses flour, 1 small teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking powder. Rub in butter size of an English walnut or more. Into this pour enough cold water to make a stiff dough as dry as possible, just as if you were trying to make good pie crust.
Spread on board by hand pressure, and keep the edges from parting by the support of one hand while you spread with the other. At the last, roll your rolling pin over it to smoothen the surface. Get it ¼ inch thick, cut in squares, put in moderate oven and bake until it is quite hard through. -C. Mc Gillivray, Mission City, B.C.
This is a Scottish oatcake in all but name, and the whole character of it rests on the type of oatmeal used and on keeping the dough dry. A few notes on the vague measures and the oven.
- "Standard oatmeal" means cut oats, not flakesIn Canadian and Scottish usage of the period this is medium or coarse ground oatmeal — pinhead oats put through a mill — not rolled oats. Steel-cut oats pulsed briefly in a food processor, or a bagged medium oatmeal, give the right sandy texture. Rolled oats will make a softer, flabbier biscuit.
- Butter the size of an English walnutRoughly 1 to 1½ tablespoons, about 20 g, shelled walnut rather than in shell. "Or more" is an invitation: up to 3 tablespoons gives a richer, shorter cake that is easier to handle.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350°F, though period "moderate" covered a range. At ¼ inch thick allow roughly 20 to 25 minutes, but the instruction "quite hard through" is the real test — they should snap, not bend. They crisp further as they cool, so pull them when just faintly coloured at the edges rather than browned.
- The hinge: keep the dough dryThe comparison to pie crust is the point of the recipe. Add cold water a spoonful at a time until the mass just coheres under pressure; a wet dough spreads thin but bakes leathery and refuses to dry out in the centre.
- Why it cracks, and what to doThe dough is very dry and half of it is coarse oatmeal, so there is little to hold the edges together as it is pressed out. Hence the instruction to support one side with a hand while pressing out the other. Working on a board dusted with dry oatmeal rather than flour keeps the surface from sticking without softening it.
- Baking powderA teaspoon in this quantity is a light hand and is there for a slight lift and shortness rather than any rise. Traditional Scottish oatcakes often use none at all, or a pinch of baking soda; either works here.
- Yield and keepingA dozen or more 2½-inch squares from a batch, depending on how thin you spread it. Cooled completely and stored in a tin they keep for a week or two; if they soften, five minutes in a low oven restores the snap.
- ServingGood with cheese, butter and marmalade, or alongside soup — closer to a cracker than to the sweet oat biscuit the name might suggest.
Oatcakes travelled with Scottish settlers across Canada, and this contribution from Mission City, British Columbia, is a plain domestic version of a bread that in Scotland was traditionally baked on a girdle over the fire and then hardened off before the heat to dry through. Oats grew where wheat would not, which is why oatmeal bread became the everyday bread of the Scottish uplands and much of Ireland while wheat loaves were more of a town article. The Five Roses book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by users of the flour, and this one is telling: the oatmeal is the inheritance, while the cup of white flour and the teaspoon of baking powder belong to a newer kitchen.