the soft oatmeal pancake of the Potteries: a thin, pliable, faintly sour girdle cake of oatmeal, flour, and yeast, cooked on a bakestone and rolled around bacon, cheese, and egg
Origin: Staffordshire and the Potteries, England
From the journey of Oat.
The Staffordshire oatcake is a wholly different thing from the hard, dry oatcake of Scotland: it is a soft, thin, flexible pancake, the colour and pliability of a crêpe, made from a yeasted batter of oatmeal, flour, milk, and water and cooked on a hot bakestone. It is the traditional food of the Potteries, the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent, where it fuelled the potters and miners of the industrial north and where it is still eaten with fierce local devotion; it has been called, with justice, 'the Potteries' answer to the pizza'. For much of the twentieth century oatcakes were sold hot through the front windows of terraced houses turned into tiny oatcake shops, and a handful of such shops survive, alongside the market stalls and bakeries that supply them by the dozen. The batter is left to ferment with yeast, which gives the finished oatcake its characteristic faint sourness and soft, slightly holey texture, closer to a crumpet batter than to a biscuit dough. Cooked on a griddle until set and lightly freckled, the oatcakes are eaten hot, most classically filled with bacon, grated cheese, egg, and sausage for a substantial breakfast, the cheese melting as the oatcake is folded or rolled around it; but they are equally good with butter and golden syrup, or with jam, for something sweet. They freeze and reheat well, and a Potteries household is rarely without a stack. Where the Scottish oatcake is the hard bread of the crofter, the Staffordshire oatcake is the soft, hot, savoury street food of the English industrial north.
The ratio of oatmeal to flour varies from cook to cook and shop to shop; some use more oatmeal for a nuttier, coarser oatcake, others more flour for a softer one. Fine oatmeal gives the smoothest batter; medium oatmeal a more textured oatcake. A spoonful of a previous batch's batter can be used to start the ferment in place of, or alongside, the yeast, giving a more sourdough-like tang. The oatcakes keep for several days refrigerated and freeze well; reheat on a dry griddle rather than in a microwave, which makes them tough.
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