Have your oatcake and eat it

Delicious with sweet or savoury toppings–or, for the purist, plain–oatcakes have long been a kitchen staple and not only for Scots

- Debora Robertson

IN a life of overwhelming choices, sometimes the appeal of the familiar, the comforting, endures—like the relief of sitting down with a good friend over a cup of tea after the enforced excitement of a week of cocktail parties. Sometimes, the simplest pleasures are the most precious ones. Step forward, the oatcake.

For centuries, the oatcake was part of the staple diet of not only the Scottish Highlands, but also of the Pennines and Lake District, essentially regions where the climate was too wet and cold successfully to grow any cereals other than oats. Hunger, thrift and necessity produced the oatcakes that we continue to enjoy today as a quick snack, as something to go with lunch or dinner or to serve —all gussied up—as an hors d’oeuvre.

Oatcakes are made with few ingredients—oats, salt and water, with sometimes a pinch of sugar and a little fat. A few scraps of butter, lard, poultry fat or the drippings from the bacon pan add an extra zing of indulgence. In her classic book on Scottish cooking, The Scots Kitchen, first published in 1929, F. Marian McNeill, also describes making oatcakes with whey in place of the fat and water. Bicarbonate of soda was traditionally used as a leavening agent, but, it needs an acid to activate it, so baking powder, which does not, works just as well.

In the west of Scotland, the word bannocks is used interchangeably with oatcakes, whereas elsewhere bannocks contain some wheat flour to soften them, or traditionally barley—or beremeal—the primitive form of barley found in Orkney and Shetland.