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Bannocks
Ever since Alfred the Great burned them, bannocks have been almost any unleavened cakes that are browned on one side and then turned to brown on the other. Alfred's were probably made of ground oats, or of pea meal. But campers' bannocks are usually made of corn meal, and here is one kind:
I CUP CORN MEAL 1/2 TEASPOON SALT BOILING WATER 2 TABLESPOONS FAT Mix in order given, using enough boiling water to make mixture of the consistency of heavy cream. Pour into wellgreased frying pan and spread 1/2 inch thick. Set in hot embers that are well covered with ashes and bake until brown underneath, keeping pan covered. Then uncover and set before fire to brown and bake top. Do not be afraid to bake your bannocks slowly, remembering that Alfred probably got into trouble by trying to cook his too fast. Eat them with syrup after they are split and buttered, and when they get hard dunk them into coffee or milk.
A cornmeal hoecake baked in a greased pan, first from below in embers and then face-up before the fire. The whole thing hinges on the boiling water and a slow bake.
- Boiling water, not warmThe water should be at a full boil when it hits the meal; it gelatinizes the starch so the batter holds together without egg or leavening. Cooler water tends to give a grittier cake that is more likely to break up when turned.
- The consistency test"Heavy cream" means pourable but not thin. The recipe gives no quantity of water, so add it in stages until the batter pours, since grind coarseness changes how much the meal drinks.
- Cornmeal choiceUse stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not degerminated fine meal and not corn flour or masa. Self-rising cornmeal mix will defeat the point, as a bannock is unleavened.
- The fatTwo tablespoons of any solid cooking fat, historically bacon drippings or lard; butter or oil works. Grease the pan generously as well, or the cake will weld to it.
- PanA heavy cast-iron skillet, 8 to 10 inches, suits the ember method best. Thin pans scorch the bottom before the centre sets.
- Heat and timingEmbers banked with ash give a moderate, uneven heat that cannot be read as a fixed temperature. Reckon on roughly 20 to 30 minutes covered for the underside to brown and set, then 5 to 10 minutes tilted toward open flame to colour the top, judging by the recipe's own test of brown underneath.
- Indoor equivalentStart the greased skillet over low heat on the stove until the base is browned and the batter is firm, then finish it under the broiler or in a 375F oven to set and colour the top.
- YieldOne cup of meal makes a single half-inch cake, cut into four or five wedges. Serves two as a bread course, one hungry camper.
The burnt-cakes story is legend rather than record: the tale of Alfred the Great sheltering in a cottage in the Somerset marshes and letting the woman's cakes scorch does not appear in Asser's near-contemporary biography but surfaces in later sources, and is generally treated as folklore. The word bannock is recorded in Old English as bannuc and is usually taken to be of Celtic origin (compare Gaelic bonnach); a derivation from Latin panicium has been proposed but is not certain. In Britain it meant a flat unleavened cake of oats, barley or pease meal cooked on a griddle or hearthstone. American campers and frontier cooks kept the name but swapped the grain, so bannock, hoecake, journey cake and corn pone all describe much the same thing: meal, salt, fat and hot water, cooked in the one pan a traveller carried. The advice at the end, to dunk the hardened remains in coffee, is the honest note in the recipe: unleavened corn bread is excellent hot and stony by the next morning.