There’s only one way to make oatcakes.
There’s only one way to make oatcakes – perhaps
Two summers ago, I was in the cast for the Highland Arts Theatre’s production of “Kitchen Party” and I suggested to the director and playwright, Wesley Colford, that I might have an idea for a song about oatcakes. Because, I thought, nothing says Cape Breton like oatcakes. Wesley said fine and I started researching it.
Easy peasy, I thought. I had a couple of local cookbooks, the kind that the women’s auxiliary of a church congregation might put out as a fundraiser, that I thought would give me all the information I needed.
Thus, I began a two-year voyage of discovery that showed me how wrong I was.
First thing I realized was none of the recipes I found, and I found half a dozen from all over Cape Breton, agreed on what should have been a very simple food. More importantly, writing a song based around a recipe kind of lacked, let’s say, drama.
Luckily, I ran out of time to get it in the show and had a couple of other songs to fill in so the show went on without my take on oatcakes.
Two years later, the HAT announced a remount of “Kitchen Party” for their 2018 summer season and Wesley asked me how the “Oatcakes” song was coming. I foolishly said it’s coming along fine.
I mentioned to a friend my creative predicament and he said maybe I should look at some videos of a series of epic comedy rap battles between familiar historical figures. One I particularly liked had Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking dissing each other.
I thought maybe a rap song would work but quickly realized no one on Planet Earth wants to hear my version of rap. But the idea of two oatcakes bakers squaring off over who has the best recipe made a lot of sense.
I googled “Cape Breton Oatcakes Recipes” and was informed there were 32,900 results.
The first page had recipes that suggested rolled oats, porridge oats, and oatmeal. There was also no agreement on whether to use butter, margarine, or lard. Proportions of other ingredients, like salt, baking soda, water or sugar (brown or refined), varied as well.
The suggestion that crème de tartar could be used made it into the lyric as a Mainland blasphemy.
And once one settled on which ingredients and how much of them to use, no recipe (and we are straying into just page two of Google) could agree how high to heat the oven to for baking (suggestions started at 350 F and went as high as 450 F. Length of baking time also differed even between recipes that agreed on oven temperature.
But, even then, before the oven was turned on, some recipes suggested chilling the dough mixture in the fridge for different lengths of time to thicken it.
However, despite their differences or maybe because of their differences, I was able to use the refrain “More Butter! More Butter!” because what recipe isn’t made better with more butter? (Although, the word, “lard,” has enormous comedic lyric potential.)
For a couple of days I was an internet expert on Cape Breton oatcakes recipes. Friends were
canvassed about their own family oatcakes recipes. I went looking for other songs about food and found The Beatles, my favourite band, wrote extensively on the subject but not oatcakes.
I finished the song and it’s in the show.
I told a friend whose family still lives in Mabou how I managed to get every recipe variation a mention into the song and proceeded to proudly rhyme all of the different kinds of oats I included.
She was unimpressed and told me “Everybody knows the only way to make real Cape Breton oatcakes is with Scotch oats.”
Like the song says, “There’s only one way to oatcakes
The old-fashioned Cape Breton way
The fixin’s may differ
As long as you give’er More butter they’ll turn out okay.”
“Kitchen Party” has three more performances weekly on Thursday nights, 8 p.m., at the Highland Arts Theatre, Bentinck Street, Sydney.
And instead of the usual fudge, for this show the concession stand is selling, you guessed it, oatcakes.