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Scotch Oaten Cakes
2 cups oatmeal 1 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup or more of cold water Sift the flour, oatmeal and salt together, and chop the butter into it. Mix with cold water into a stiff dough. Knead and roll into very thin cakes. Roll out into a round piece and cut the circle into quarters. Bake in the toasting oven directly under, but not too near, the flame, for eight to ten minutes, until delicately browned on both sides.
A plain oatcake dough, mixed cold and cooked fast. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of oatmeal you buy, and how thin you get it rolled.
- "Oatmeal" is not rolled oatsIn a book of this period oatmeal means ground oats — medium or fine pinhead meal, gritty like coarse semolina. Rolled flakes will not hydrate the same way and give a shaggy cake that crumbles at the fold; if flakes are all you have, grind them briefly in a food processor first.
- You cannot sift oatmealYou may not be able to sift the meal -- Coarse or pinhead meal will not pass a sifter; sift the flour and salt and stir the meal in by hand. Fine meal will go through.
- The toasting ovenThis is the grill or broiler compartment of a gas range: radiant heat from above, the food turned partway through. A modern broiler on medium, with the rack set low, does the same job, but the cakes need watching and turning at four to five minutes.
- Roll thinner than feels rightAbout 1/8 inch, or thin enough to see the shadow of your hand through the sheet. Thick oatcakes stay soft in the middle and go leathery rather than crisp. Dust the board and pin with dry oatmeal, not flour, to keep the surface characteristically rough.
- Water is a range, not a measureHalf a cup "or more" is honest — meal grinds and flour absorb differently. Add water a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed; a wet dough spreads and toughens.
- Quarters means farlsA rolled round cut in four gives the traditional Scottish farl.
- Butter and keepingThree tablespoons in three cups of dry meal is a lean cake by modern standards, which is why it crisps rather than shortens. Cool the cakes flat on a rack; they soften in a day and are best re-crisped in a low oven before serving with cheese or butter.
Oatcakes are the everyday bread of the north and west of Scotland, where oats grew where wheat would not, and they were traditionally baked on a girdle (griddle) over the fire and then finished upright on a toasting stone or metal stand set before the flame to dry out. The cut into farls, from an old Scots word for a fourth part, survives in bannocks and soda farls as well.