SC - Re: Oat cakes

[david friedman]

At 10:59 AM -0500 3/15/00, ChannonM at aol.com wrote:
>A short time ago, his Grace, Duke Sir Cariodoc, posted that Froissart
>described an oatcake and it was in the Miscellany.
>
>Beg my idiocy, but for the life of me I can't find it. Would anyone be so
>kind as to point me in the right direction as to where it's located? I have
>the Miscellany, but I'm either blind, stupid or just overloaded with
>information and unable to see the forest for the trees (of leeks that is)

Which edition do you have? I don't believe it is in the (old) webbed 
edition. The article is:
- --

Scottish Oat Cakes: A Conjectural Reconstruction

"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." 
(Froissart's Chronicles, Penguin Books translation.)

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
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/