In this 2017 article for Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Georgia Wild explores the history and contested origins of Derbyshire and Staffordshire oatcakes. Her recollections and views are her own.
Cover photograph: Castorly Stock / Pexels.
Oatcakes in various forms hail from all over the country. For many it is a Scottish food item, somewhere between a cracker and a biscuit, dry and savoury.
But here in the north and east Midlands an oatcake is a very different creature. Taking the form of a dark pancake, the batter, a mix of oatmeal, wheat flour and yeast, is left to rise before being cooked in a dry pan or on a hot plate. Recipes and resting times vary. It is often served as a breakfast dish or as a light meal with bacon, cheese, mushrooms, sausage, tomato…
From as far north as Chesterfield to the Derbyshire dales and the Staffordshire moorlands people are proud and protective of their form of oatcake. But nowhere more than the Staffordshire Derbyshire borders do folk vie for its provenance.
From both regions families have tales of a great grandma ladling jugs of live, fizzing oatcake batter onto a hot griddle pan. Wild cites a 17th-century account of High Peak grain stocks consisting of ‘oats and not much else’. She also cites John Farey’s 1817 account of fermented oatcake batter being cooked on a bakestone at Pilsbury, and Sir Humphry Davy’s description of Derbyshire miners preferring oatcakes to wheaten bread. In ‘The Staffordshire Oatcake: A History’ food historian Pamela Sambrooke found seventeenth century probate inventories from the Staffordshire moorlands listing ‘doshens’ and ‘back sprittles’, fermentation buckets and boards to flip oatcakes as well as the tell-tale ‘baxtons’ or bakestones.
It was there in north Staffordshire that oatcake making was taken to a higher level. Here housewives would make batches by the dozen on the range to sell from the windows of terraced houses to miners returning home from their shift. This tradition developed into the more commercial enterprise of oatcake shops still seen in towns of north Staffordshire today. Stoke City supporters named their fanzine The Oatcake.
Recipes are closely guarded which accounts for much of the regional differences. Leek and Buxton have the most substantial of oatcakes, thick with oatmeal. The Potteries towns of Tunstall and Longton have the finest, with oatcakes as lacy and delicate as edible brown doilies. ‘Feed me an oatcake blindfolded,’ my brother used to say. He could always tell which oatcake shop or bakery it was made. For indeed now many of the oatcakes bought in supermarkets are made in large bakeries.
Here I have to confess to being a Staffordshire lass by birth and I am prepared to take the flack if Derbyshire oatcake makers call me out with evidence to the contrary; but I think they originate over the border.
North Staffordshire has its own pikelet, which local writer Arthur Berry celebrated:
‘The Pikelet you ask – what is that?
It’s a sort of female Oatcake
Smaller, thicker, sweeter
More immediately seductive
Sometimes with currants in it
A muffin for the Lumpen working class
Best eaten soaked in butter or marge.’
Arthur Berry, artist and playwright, ‘Ode to the Oatcake’, 1980
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