Derbyshire Oatcake

The Derbyshire oatcake begins the night before it is eaten. Coarse oatmeal and a little wheat flour are whisked into water with yeast and a spoon of milk, then the bowl is covered and left to stand overnight in a cool kitchen. By morning the batter has gone faintly sour and lively, risen and pocked with bubbles, the yeast and the oats having worked on each other in the dark. That overnight ferment is what separates a real oatcake from a quick pancake: it is what gives the finished round its tang and its pliable, slightly elastic body rather than a flat, cakey crumb.

It is cooked on a bakestone, which in the dales is as likely to be called a backstone or a baxton as a griddle. The plate is brought up hot and left dry, no fat, and a ladle of the slack batter is poured and swirled until it spreads thin and wide. It sets quickly. The surface dulls from wet to matte and freckles with small holes as the steam escapes, and once the underside has taken colour the whole disc is flipped for a moment on the second face. A good one comes off soft and bendable, the colour of weak tea, the size of a dinner plate.

The oats are the reason it tastes the way it does. Oatmeal gives a nutty, faintly bitter, earthy flavour that wheat alone never carries, and a slightly granular bite under the soft surface. The Derbyshire round leans further into that than its neighbour does: the versions made around Leek and Buxton are the thickest and most substantial, heavy with oatmeal, where the Staffordshire kind is thinner, lacier and more delicate. A small amount of milk in the Derbyshire batter, and a larger diameter, are the usual tells. A batch that fills four Derbyshire plates would stretch to a dozen Staffordshire ones.

What turns the round into a meal is the fold. The oatcake goes back onto a warm surface, grated cheese is scattered across it so the heat slumps it into the holes, and bacon, sausage, a fried egg, mushrooms or tomato are laid over the top. Then it is folded, in half or in thirds, into a soft parcel you can hold. The cheese is doing the work of glue as much as flavour, melting down between the oat surface and the filling so the whole thing holds rather than sliding apart in the hand. Eaten hot off the stone, it is breakfast and it is comfort in one piece.

The texture is the point of the exercise. Cold and unfilled, an oatcake is dull and a little leathery, which is why it is reheated; warm, it turns soft and faintly springy, the oats giving a gentle chew under a surface gone tacky from the melted cheese. Bite through a folded one and there is grated cheddar gone to liquid, the salt of the bacon, the savoury give of the oat, all warm at once. It does not crunch and it does not crisp. The pleasure is the soft, savoury, slightly sour density of an oat round carrying a hot filling.

It belongs to the morning and to the place. Across the High Peak and the eastern dales it is breakfast food, sold from oatcake makers and small bakers and griddled at home, eaten the way other regions eat a bacon roll. The plainest order is cheese, melted into the round and folded over; the fuller plate adds the bacon and the egg and the sausage. It travels badly and keeps poorly, which is part of why it stays a local thing, a food of Chesterfield and Buxton and the villages between rather than a thing you find far from the grain that made it.

There is a rivalry built into the very name. The Staffordshire oatcake, made a few miles to the west in the Potteries, is the more famous of the two, and Derbyshire makers are quick to point out that theirs is the thicker, more oaty round and that the Potteries version is the thin, crepe-like cousin. Both sides claim the older tradition. The argument is real and good-natured, and it runs along the county line, but it is an argument over two close kin of the same fermented oat batter rather than over two different foods.

Oats where wheat would not grow

The honest history of the Derbyshire oatcake is the history of a grain growing where little else would. In the cool, wet, high country of the Peak District wheat struggled and oats did not, so for centuries the oat was the everyday crop and oat-based food the everyday diet. Officials in the High Peak as far back as the seventeenth century recorded that the local grain stock was, in effect, oats and not much else. An oatcake griddled on a hot stone was the plain daily bread of a district that could not easily grow the wheat for a loaf.

The print record is thin but real, and it is Derbyshire's own rather than borrowed from over the border. In 1817 the topographer John Farey described oatcake being made at Pilsbury, near Hartington, noting how an acid fermentation was set going in the batter before it was poured onto the hot bakestone, which is recognisably the same overnight-soured method used today. Around the same period Sir Humphry Davy recorded that Derbyshire miners preferred their oat-cakes to wheaten bread. Neither names an inventor, because there was not one to name; what they fix is a settled, dated, working tradition.

What the early accounts cannot settle is the older quarrel with Staffordshire, and it is fairer to leave it open than to award it. Both counties have eaten griddled oatcakes for as long as the records reach, both shaped by the same upland reliance on oats, and each remembers the food as its own. The Derbyshire round is the thicker, oatier, slightly milkier version of a shared idea, kept alive in the dales as a breakfast that still tastes of the grain that the hills would actually grow.