Bannock

The Prairie flatbread, wheat flour and fat worked quickly and cooked in a pan, over a fire, or on a stick, and the everyday bread of the fur trade and the north

Origin: The Red River Valley and the Canadian Prairies

From the journey of Wheat.

Bannock is a plain quick bread of flour, fat, a raising agent, and water, cooked in a heavy pan, baked beside a fire, or wound round a stick and held over the coals. It is eaten across Canada and is central to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit food today, and its history is inseparable from the wheat that came into the North-West with the fur trade. The name is Scots, from Gaelic bannach, a griddle cake, and it arrived with Orkney and Highland men working for the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company. What it met were peoples with their own long-established breads of ground maize, wild rice, and roots, and the wheat flour that came upriver in company stores and later in treaty rations was adopted, adapted, and made into something else. That history is not a comfortable one: flour, lard, sugar, and salt arrived alongside the collapse of the bison herds and the confinement of communities to reserves, and bannock carries that memory as well as genuine affection. The Prairie wheat that eventually supplied it is a story of plant breeding. David Fife of Peterborough sowed seed obtained from a shipment out of Danzig in the 1840s and selected from it the variety that became Red Fife: hardy, high in protein, and the parent of nearly everything grown on the Canadian plains afterwards. Charles Saunders crossed it at Ottawa to produce Marquis, released in 1911, which ripened a week or more earlier and pushed the wheat frontier hundreds of miles north. There is no single correct bannock. It is fried, baked, or cooked on a stick; made with lard, butter, or bacon fat; plain, or with raisins, or with berries worked through it. What it is not is fussy, and every version is a variation on flour, fat, and heat.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 500 g plain flour
  • 4 tsp baking powder
  • 1.5 tsp fine salt
  • 2 tbsp caster sugar, optional
  • 80 g lard, butter, or bacon fat, plus more for the pan
  • 350 ml water or milk, cold

Additions

  • 100 g saskatoon berries, blueberries, or raisins, optional

Method

  1. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar together in a bowl.
  2. Rub in the fat with your fingertips until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
  3. Make a well, pour in most of the liquid, and bring it together with a fork into a soft, shaggy dough, adding the rest only if it is dry. Fold through the berries if using.
  4. Turn out onto a floured surface and pat, do not roll, into a round about 2 cm thick.
  5. For the pan version, heat a heavy frying pan over a medium-low heat with a little fat. Cook the round for ten to twelve minutes a side, covered if you can, until deeply golden and hollow-sounding when tapped.
  6. For the oven version, bake at 200C (fan 180C, gas 6) for twenty to twenty-five minutes until risen and golden.
  7. For the fire version, wrap ropes of dough in a spiral round green sticks and turn them slowly over embers, not flames, for fifteen to twenty minutes.
  8. Break it apart by hand and eat warm, with butter, jam, or stew.

Notes

Saskatoon berries are the Prairie fruit for this and are worth using if you can find them frozen; blueberries are the usual substitute. Fried bannock, cooked in a deep pan of hot fat rather than a dry one, is a distinct and very popular version, softer and richer. The dough can be made ahead as a dry mix and carried, with the liquid added at the point of cooking, which is exactly what it was designed for. The Scottish bannock the name comes from is an oat or barley griddle cake and is a different bread. The Canadian one is a wheat bread and a product of the fur trade.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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