SC - Help!!! Oatcake recipe-long

[pat fee]

  My recipe for oat cakes calls for butter and long pepper.

  The one I use weekly is a slightly modern addaptation of the original.

  Original (translated)

  32 oz ground scotts oatmeal or 1 box rolled oats ground in a blender.
   8 oz melted butter or enough to give the dough some "body"
   2 long pepper ground in a pestle and morter
   Enough water to moisten.

   Mix the oats with  long pepper and enough butter to form lumps.
   slowely add cold water until dough holds togather (sort of like pie 
crust).
  Cover a bread board with a hand full of the ground oats and roll the dough 
out into 8" circles.  Place a scant handfull of the ground oats on a  hot 
gridle. Carefully place the oat cake on the oats.  Bake untill dry and 
"crumbly" on the edges and dry and lightly browned on the bottom.  Cut into 
8 wedges.

  This recipe is from my family cook book.  The measurements are what is 
modern and have been worked out over time.

  Lady Katherine McGuire


>From: ChannonM at aol.com
>Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>Subject: Re: SC - Help!!! Oatcake recipe-long
>Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 07:26:51 EDT
>
>I have a recipe for Oatcakes (can't say that word without invoking a thick
>Scottish accent-ooouuutcaaakes)
>
>Here is some work on the matter. I used the recipe for an Irish feast. It
>worked very well using an oven and can be made ahead.
>
>  A period reference to scottish oat cakes is found as an observation by
>Froissart, as found in Cariadoc’s Miscellany,
>
>"the only things they take with them [when riding to war] are a large
>flat stone placed between the saddle and the saddle-cloth and a bag
>of oatmeal strapped behind. When they have lived so long on
>half-cooked meat that their stomachs feel weak and hollow, they lay
>these stones on a fire and, mixing a little of their oatmeal with
>water, they sprinkle the thin paste on the hot stone and make a small
>cake, rather like a wafer, which they eat to help their digestion.
>
>
>Oatcakes
>His Grace, Duke Sir Cariadoc writes;
>So far as I know, there are no surviving period recipes for oat cakes. This
>article is an attempt to reconstruct them, mainly on the basis of 
>Froissart's
>brief comment. Rolled oats--what we today call "oatmeal"--are a modern
>invention. I assume that "oat meal" in the middle ages meant the same thing
>as "meal" in other contexts--a coarse flour. The only other ingredient
>mentioned is water, but salt is frequently omitted in medieval
>recipes--Platina, for instance, explicitly says that he doesn't bother to
>mention it--so I have felt free to include it. The oat cakes Froissart
>describes are field rations, so unlikely to contain any perishable
>ingredients such as butter or lard, although they may possibly have been 
>used
>in other contexts.Consistent with these comments, the following is my
>conjectural recipe for oatcakes as they might have been made by Scottish
>troopers c. 1400:
>
>1/2 c "Scottish Oatmeal" --very coarsely ground whole oats. 1/4 c water
>1/4 t salt
>
>Put the oatmeal in a spice grinder and process for about 20 seconds,
>producing something intermediate between
>what you started with and bread flour. Add salt and water and let the 
>mixture
>stand for about
>fifteen minutes. Make flat cakes 1/4" to 3/8" in thickness, cook on a 
>medium
>hot griddle, without oil, about 3-5 minutes.
>
>The result is a reasonably tasty flat bread. In scaling the recipe up for a
>meal or a feast, you would want to experiment with grinding whole oats into
>meal or find a finer (and less expensive) oatmeal
>than the gourmet product, intended for making porridge, that I was using.
>
>(An earlier version of this article was published in Serve it Forth:
>A Periodical Forum for SCA Cooks, Volume I, Number 2 (April 1996).
>Information on that publication is available from Mary Morman
>(Mistress Elaina de Sinistre), 1245 Allegheny Drive, Colorado
>Springs, CO 80919,  memorman at oldcolo.com.)
>
>David/Cariadoc
>
>
>The recipe that I was working on originates in Traditional Irish Recipes, 
>by
>John Murphy and is simply oats and water. There is a second recipe that 
>comes
>from The Scots Kitchen, by Meg Dod. The latter recipe includes flour, 
>sugar,
>eggs and milk. A bit more rich than the former.
>
>
>This is my redacted recipe based on Froissarts observations;
>.75 lbs steelcut oats
>2 cups hot water
>pinch salt
>
>mix ingredients, let sit for a few hours to soak up water. Make 4 inch 
>cakes.
>Cook on a greased med-hot grill for 7-10 minutes on one side.  Place in a 
>350
>degree  oven for a further 7-10 minutes. makes 16 cakes
>
>The following recipe is one that I developed based on the more elaborate
>recipe from the later period source and in conjunction with one that
>originates from a restaurant in Carrickfergus named Killybegs.
>
>
>The World’s Best Oatcakes
>(As Sampled in Killybegs, November 96)
>Ingredients
>1 ½ cups white flour
>2 cups rolled oats or oatmeal
>1 teaspoon baking powder
>¼ teaspoon salt
>¼ cup sugar
>¼ pound of butter (you can substitute cooking oil for the butter, with
>reducing the amount of milk; it just makes a crisper cake)
>¾ cup buttermilk or sweet milk soured with a little vinegar.
>What to Do
>Mix together the dry ingredients.
>Cut in ¼ pound butter or rub it in with your fingers until the mixture is
>like fine meal.
>Add ¾ cup buttermilk or sweet milk soured with a little vinegar.
>Work the dough briefly with your hands, adding a few more sprinklings of
>flour, until it is no longer sticky. Divide dough into 6 lumps. Patting it
>with your hands, shape the six lumps into flat disks, about 4 or 5 inches 
>in
>diameter, doesn’t matter how thick. Put them on a buttered cookie tin. Cut
>each disk into quarters but don’t separate them. With the point of a butter
>knife, print a small cross into each quarter. (An old Irish cook told me 
>this
>lets the devil out and makes them keep better; I never omit this step.)
>Bake them in a preheated oven at 400 degrees F. (200 degrees centigrade) 
>for
>about 15-20 minutes, until they start to be tinged with brown. Turn the 
>oven
>off, leave the oven door ajar, and let them crisp up on the outside for ten
>minutes more. Break the quarters apart. And serve them hot or cold with 
>tea.
>With butter or cheese or jam. Or tuck them in your kit bag if you’re going
>off to war or to the New World, or any place where you might need 
>nourishing,
>long-keeping food. I bet William Wallace ate a lot of these cakes in his
>skirmishes with the invaders.
>
>
>Scots Crumpets , A traditional recipe from The Scots Kitchen,  Meg Dod, 
>1929
>
>Flour, sugar, eggs, milk.
>
>Make the batter some hours before it is required. Beat separately the yolks
>and whites of four eggs. Pour into a basin and add half a pint of milk and
>three tablespoonfuls of sugar. Mix well, and gradually add flour till you
>have a thickish batter. Beat till quite smooth and set aside. Put a girdle 
>or
>frying-pan on a bright clear fire and rub with suet. To have light, pretty
>crumpets the fire must be brisk and the girdle hot, so that they will reise
>quickly. Drop with a spoon as many as the girdle will hold, and before they
>have time to form a skin and get dry on the top they should be ready to 
>turn.
>Do this quickly, and a lovely golden-brown skin as smooth as velvet will be
>formed and a delightfully light crumpet produced.
>
>
>Hauviette’s Adapted Recipe for Oatcakes
>makes 16 oatcakes
>1 cup of oat flour (2 cups ground rolled oats)
>1 cup of  course ground steel cut oats
>1cup butter milk or soured milk
>3 eggs
>pinch of salt
>
>Mix ingredients. Let sit for 1 hour. Cook as a pancake, on a hot griddle, 
>not
>turning, but placing into a 350 degree oven to dry the tops.
>
>Best of Luck with them!
>
>Hauviette
>
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