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Bannocks
1 pound of fine oatmeal 1/2 ounce of baking powder 1 ounce of butter 1 teaspoon salt Mix together the oatmeal and baking powder, rub in the butter, and make into a stiff dough with water. Roll out as thin as possible; cut into rounds with a tumbler. Butter a frying-pan, and cook a few at a time; when done on one side, turn carefully. Serve with butter or syrup. If more convenient they may be cooked on a well heated soapstone griddle and turned with a cake lifter.
A Scottish oatcake dressed up with baking powder and cooked on the stovetop. The dough has no gluten to speak of, which governs almost everything about handling it.
- Handle it as a short dough, not a bread doughOatmeal alone builds no gluten, so the dough tears rather than stretches. Roll it between sheets of parchment or on a surface dusted with more oatmeal, and patch cracks with your fingers instead of re-kneading.
- "Fine oatmeal" is not rolled oatsThis means finely ground oatmeal, closer to a coarse flour than to flakes — sold today as fine or superfine oatmeal, or oat flour. Rolled oats blitzed briefly in a food processor come close; whole flakes will not hold together.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of fine oatmeal is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups, depending on the grind. Half an ounce of baking powder is about 1 tablespoon, and one ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- The water is unmeasuredThe original leaves it to judgment. Expect somewhere near 1 to 1 1/4 cups of hot water, added a little at a time until the dough just holds; hot water softens the oatmeal and makes it far less crumbly.
- A tumblerA drinking glass used as a cutter, so rounds of about 3 inches. How many you get from a pound of oatmeal will vary widely with how thin you manage to roll.
- Pan heatMedium, around 350F on an electric griddle. Too hot and the outside scorches before the raw oatmeal taste cooks off; figure 4 to 5 minutes a side and look for dry, faintly speckled surfaces.
- Butter the pan lightlyThese are meant to bake on the surface, not fry. A film of butter wiped on with paper is enough — excess fat pools and softens the edges. A well-seasoned cast-iron pan needs almost nothing.
- Soapstone griddleA slab of soapstone heated over the burner, valued because it holds steady heat and does not scorch. Cast iron does the same job; heat it thoroughly before the first batch so the pan temperature does not drop when the rounds go on.
- ServingBest warm from the pan with butter or syrup, as directed. They stale quickly but crisp again in a dry pan or a 300F oven.
The bannock is Scottish and much older than baking powder — a flat cake of oatmeal or barley meal baked on a girdle (griddle) or a bakestone set over the fire, in a country where oats grew where wheat would not. The word is generally traced to Old English bannuc, and bannocks were often unleavened, though some were raised with barm, which is what makes this version, with its half-ounce of baking powder, an adaptation for the household range. Oatmeal was cheap, filling, and respectably nourishing, and cookery that leaned hard on grains could use it to carry a meal. The instruction to use a soapstone griddle points to a real piece of American kitchen equipment of the period, prized for even heat and a surface that needed little grease.