In Search of the Primal Oatcake

North Staffordshire, where I grew up (the growing up is an unfinished project by the way), has a few claims to fame. Readers of this blog will already have sighed "The setting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and of course that is foremost in my mind but there's more! The the six towns of the Potteries are where world class china was made: Minton, Royal Doulton, Spode, Wedgwood, Moorcroft, Midwinter, Shelley are just a few of the many, many pot banks (as we called them).

Isn't it shocking that so much beauty and utility came from such a degraded environment? 

It was the birth place of Reginald Mitchell the designer of the Spitfire. Hanley's Victoria Hall has one of the finest acoustics of any concert hall anywhere, much praised by Thomas Beecham and John Barbirolli. And then there's the Oatcake. Capitalisation is essential to differentiate it from the dry, small, rather impoverished Scottish oatcake that always reminds me of something that has half the recipe missing; the half that gives it flavour. No, the North Staffordshire Oatcake is a much more expansive and cosily enveloping affair altogether.  Imagine a substantial yeast leavened pancake made from wholemeal flour and oatmeal and cooked on a flat surface of hot metal lovingly rolled around a filling of your choice. It's Stoke's version of the tortilla.

Ex pats used to rely on visitors or returning home to get their oatcakes, usually from a little family concern preparing and selling the oatcakes in dozens from corner terraced houses or tiny shops. Nowadays you can get them from branches of bigger supermarkets from their Ethnic Breads shelf. These are rather smaller and seem less tasty than the ones from the homelier bakeries still dotted around North Staffs and each having their partisan supporters who swear that their source is best.

I've always loved oatcakes; Grandma used to do them with cheese and bacon and for a treat, a particularly delicious sweet filling of Golden Syrup on a hot buttered oatcake. It dripped lasciviously down your fingers and demanded to be sucked and licked........sorry........just a minute, I need to recompose myself after imagining such guilty pleasures. It's no wonder I used to struggle with my weight! 

In my healthier later days I've filled them with smoked salmon and rocket, cottage cheese and brinjal pickle and a particular favourite is chilli sans carne. Someone mentioned fusion? Thought not. At a pinch, just rolled up and dipped in homemade soup is good too. When I lived in London, before the Ethnic Bread stage, Mum gave me a recipe but it was complicated and I tried it once and then resorted to trips home up the A5 on a series of fast motorbikes to get my fix.

Fast forward twenty years. Roachside Cottage is a delightful holiday cottage run by an old school friend (he's younger than me though) where we stayed a couple of years ago, has one of the best holiday cottage libraries I've come across. As well as a few good books on Gritstone climbing, local history, and a couple of books on SGGK and some interesting fiction, there was this.

Pamela Sambrook wrote a fine history and also included some authentic recipes. As readers of earlier blogs will know, "authentic" has a hallowed tone when we pronounce it in our house. Getting Things Right is important. Getting Things Historically Right is even better. What Pamela discovered is that oats were a staple crop in the Staffordshire Moorlands and the oatcake was a very primitive way of eating that crop.  The simplest recipe just involved milled oats (Millstone Grit was in abundance) and water put in a previously used jug that hadn't been washed out. In other words, a sourdough. I'd been to San Francisco and never managed to recapture the sourdough I'd had there but I did recognise the technique. Pamela's wonderful little book also contained nuggets of culinary history: Did you know that oats from a good harvest were always milled? Rolled oats or what we know as porridge oats were the poorest oats that hadn't got the full starch content. I didn't think so.
We have an excellent grocer's stall in Norwich Market called Herbs and Spices who sell all manner of cereals from big sacks measured into brown paper bags. Just my sort of shop. So armed with four bags of different grade oat flour ranging from pinhead to fine I went home and experimented. The optimum mix seemed to be more or less one volume measure of each type of flour. This is when I should give a recipe. I'm not going to because a huge amount of the pleasure of cooking is to find your own way of doing things. Experiment with small quantities, and when it's as you like it, stick to that way of doing things.
They are the ultimate healthy food! The only added fat is a smear of sunflower oil to coat the bake stone. I add a few scoops of oat bran to up the fibre and anti-cholesterol quotient too. Their primitiveness is very appealing and would that I had enough of a garden to grow my own, but at least I have total control of what goes in them. My oatcakes have become a bit of a joke with the family: no-one else eats them, but Taryn, Caitlin's best friend, and a proud vegan, absolutely loves them.

The search for the simplest oatcake has led me down a path of paring down ingredients and processes. I never weigh anything; it's all guesswork and cooking times are very loose depending on temperature of the bakestone. This means, of course, that each batch tastes different. No homogeneity here! The only packaging is brown paper, sourdough is a self sustaining leaven and at a pinch they could be cooked on a bakestone over a woodfire. Or even on the top of a wood-burning stove but I haven't tried this for fear of really upsetting the family. In a world festooned with plastic packages, food full of additives, dubious oils, harmful seasonings and animal products driven by suffering, the primal Oatcake is just a nod in the direction we should be going.