Oat Bread

So, once I had determined that I absolutely HAD to cook something, and had rootled out Mary Savelli and was poking about in that book… I contemplated her first recipe: Ætena Hlaf, or Oat Bread.
I also very quickly decided that it didn’t sound very much as one would assume a Saxon would make bread…

But before one starts rethinking, one should at least see what the starting point is!

Of course, in many ways, the flaw of this cookbook is that it’s NOT an Anglo-Saxon cook book. Nor is it a redaction of an Anglo-Saxon cooking text. It’s not even really a cook book based on a template of ‘how they did it’ and a list of known ingredients. Technically, Mary Savelli doesn’t even make this claim.
Savelli says that Ann Hagen’s works suggested dishes she’d like to try and the medicinal texts that Savelli had access to suggested ingredients. I think the weakness may occur somewhere between those lists of ‘ingedients’, and understanding the technologies and practices of the culture.

Not all medicinal herbs will be considered culinary herbs; nor should they be. And methods of preparation that seem logical to the 21st century mind might be out of keeping for the 10th century mind.

I did figure that a bread recipe should be a shorter leap, though…

Savelli’s Oat Bread recipe starts with yeast. Dry active yeast. When I try this recipe for a second time, I will make up a sourdough starter. That will still be less accurate than beginning with a wild yeast, but baby steps…

Savelli’s ingredients are:
Dry active yeast
Warm water
Milk
Rolled oats
Salt
Lard or other shortening
Liquid honey
Egg
Water
Whole wheat flour
All-purpose flour
Rolled oats and milk for brushing on, and sprinkling over the loaf before baking

Now rolled oats didn’t come along till the 1870’s, so I’m actually surprised at their inclusion here. I’d have suggested oat flour. Or at the very least, crushing or grinding the oat flakes.
And on the whole, she doesn’t call for much oat. ½ cup rolled oats to the 3 ¼ cups of other flour. With just 1 tsp of oats for sprinkling on the loaf before baking. Admittedly, oats don’t contain gluten, and gluten is important for a raised loaf. Oats usually show up as an ingredient in non-leavened breads; oatcakes and the like. Which would lead me to imagine that oats might not be used in a raised bread. Or, if used, used in combination, but then it wouldn’t be thought of, or called, an oat bread. Still, even if you were using them for flavour, I’d think you’d want to use a larger portion so the bread actually tasted oat-like. (Or is that a modern concept?) In my remake of this, I’ll try a higher percentage of oats, and assume it a mixed grain crop. [Often, grain crops were a blend of grains, possibly for reasons of contamination, or because of the different strengths of the growing stalks, which would support each other, or perhaps simply because it was less important to the farmers.] Often wheat and rye were grown together as ‘maslin’, and ground to maslin flour.

I tend to think of the use of milk, eggs, honey, and fat as a less everyday occurrence; a feast day bread. In that case, I might be tempted to use butter, rather than lard. Mind you, oat flour will give me more of an unleavened bread, even with the use of yeast or sourdough. So I’m not sure whether I should be imagining myself as lower class, baing bread for a feast day, or well-off enough to be using ingredients for a richer bread on a more regular basis. I do have some duck fat on hand, perhaps I’ll use it in my revised version.

I’ll confess that I couldn’t bring myself to just sprinkle rolled oats on this loaf as I baked it, even though I was supposed to be following the recipe as published. Instead I crushed them very quickly with a mortar and pestle, to a coarse meal.

I found that the bread did rise, thanks to the inclusion of the yeast, but it was neither strongly flavoured of oats, nor did it have the fine texture I’d expect of a wheaten bread. It was soft and crumbly, with a non-distinct taste. Neither bad, nor exceptional. But I’ll be interested to see what happens as I play around with some variations.

~v