SC - Scottish oatcakes

[pat fee]

My recipe is from my family. They were used as "journey bread" as well as a 
daily staple.

Its "ground" scotts oats + lard or butter, a little salt and enough water to 
make the dough, hang togather.
These are then cooked on a "griddle" spread with more "ground oats"

  Scotts oats are not rolled oats but "cracked" oats that need to ground in 
a blender,(morter and pestle historicaly) to provide a "meal" like product 
that is a bit finer than modern quick oats.

The modern version used oil and about 1/4 tsp of cream of tarter.

I have made these every Christmas(some times as many as 14 or so dozen)  
since I was first married in 1977, and I find the period recipe much more 
flavorfull.
>From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
>Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>Subject: Re: SC - Scottish oatcakes
>Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 21:06:09 -0700
>
>The following is my best guess at period oatcakes, from the Miscellany.
>
>---
>
>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" -- 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.daviddfriedman.com/

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