SC - Re: Oat cakes

[Philip & Susan Troy]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> 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.

The earliest actual recipe (using the term pretty loosely) I have found
is in the 1694 receipt book of Giulielma Penn, wife of William Penn.
Actually, there are two recipes, one for a leavened oaten bannock, the
other for a sgian almost identical to the one described above (the meal
is soaked overnight in water to make the batter).  It also uses no salt,
or at least mentions none, but considering that salt may have been,
under some circumstances, considered too expensive (or insert any other
adjective of your choice) for inclusion in a recipe for a bread to be
eaten with foods that may contain salt. Certainly there's no chemical
reason for including it, as you do with a leavened wheat bread.

I found that I could grind rolled oats in a coffee grinder to a
moderately fine meal, and mix in a small percentage of similarly ground
steel-cut oat groats, to improve the texture. 

I also found that the flavor was improved by a light toasting in the
oven, not inconsistent with the results of some more modern oatcake
processing done recently in England. You take a rather limpish pancakey
oatcake off the griddle, and hang it up to dry before the fire, or just
on a clothesline under the eaves. When dry/toasted it resembles
Scandinavian knackebrot, which makes sense because processing is often
similar, I gather. Also, given the Scottish wedding blessing which
involves breaking an oatcake over the bride's head, that might be hard
to do if the cake wasn't crispy. 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com