Mi Contra Fa

Accessories that worked (and didn't)

Fun day at Crown Tournament! I set up tents and made hot drinks and judged A&S.  New Storvik tent was awesome and the repaired/augmented/repainted list looked great.  Lots of people did a lot of work.

I wore my Incan outfit.  It was not the best outfit for the weather - high of 60, cloudy and chilly for a lot of the day.  I opted to leave on my pants under the tunic rather than go bare-legged, because cold.

Wool Slippers

At the last minute, I'd thrown my nalbound slippers into my bag, to wear as liners to the Roman sandals that were standing in for llama rawhide ones.  While I can't fit them into my boots as socks, the sandals adjusted around them fine.  I put them on after the dew was mostly gone, and lo! My feet stayed toasty, warm and dry all day.

Arnegunde Pin

I have a repro long pin from the Arnegunde burial from Raymond's Quiet Press.  I don't see it on their website anymore; here's a picture.  It's the really long one that looks like it could shank someone.  I have never been able to figure out how to wear it. The brass polygons weigh down the anti-pointy end, so it tends to droop down and pull itself out.

I've seen instructions for wearing Viking ring-headed pins that involve tying a thong or thread to the ring, then winding it in a figure-8 from the tie-down point, over the pinned fabric, under the pointy end, and then back. Well, I tied a thong on between two of the polygons, and it worked just as well as a ring.  I don't know if this is the "real" answer, or if the Incans secured their long cloak pins in this way - but it worked. Which was good, because I really, really needed the blue wool blanket I was using as a cloak.

Llawt'u

The feathered headband did not work, as such.  Even in mild wind, the feathers got blown around a lot.  Feathers should have been sewn down or otherwise secured, and possibly I used the wrong kind of feather.  I used some quills I had - so, turkey wing feathers, I think.  Something softer and less meant to catch air might have been better.

Hospitality

Laurel Tavern Donuts aren't period, but I only just recently tried them. They're awesome and I wanted to spread the love.  I got there too early, evidently - I got a variety of yeast-raised doughtnuts, but there were no cake ones ready yet.

Of coffee, tea, and hot cocoa, I think cocoa was the clear winner. Only made one pot of coffee, which only had one or two cups drunk.  Maybe instant next time. The stove was also useful for reheating the ribs that Uncle Igor brought.

Always learning

I'm teaching an Intro to SCA Camping tomorrow.  Since it's been a while since I made a foil meal, I figured I should fire up the grill and test-drive my recipes for the class.  I unexpectedly also learned more about charcoal cooking.

I don't usually do outdoor cooking in all weather.  Sure, wind and rain makes things harder, but... Matchlight charcoal, yeah? How hard can it be?  I got my first set of coals lit, put the lid on the grill (yes, with the air holes open) and wandered off to chop vegetables.

And when I came back, instead of nicely ashed coals, I had half-started coals.  Apparently, lid on, holes open isn't enough air to catch the charcoal?  Or else some of my initial coals went out.  I did find that I had to use 2-3 matches to get it going instead of just one.  So I learned more about charcoal grills today!

Foil Meals: I bought thin-sliced chicken breasts and put them along with thin slices of potatoes, carrots, and onions into a two-layer foil packet with Italian dressing, just like old times.  I know you're supposed to have more coals on the top than the bottom, but I think I had roughly equal amounts - but I planned to flip it halfway through anyhow, so it should have minimized any difficulties.  10 minutes chicken-side down, then 7 minutes potato-side down, and it was nicely done.  A few potatoes were a little underdone, but they were edible.

Bread: I left myself good notes from the last time, so this was more like a review than a pathfinder.  Used King Arthur bread flour, about 12-15 coals under and about 20 over, for 50 min covered the whole time. Beautiful-looking loaf, first slice tastes okay although I'm not sure if I'm still smelling raw flour.  Maybe should let cook for a full hour.

Leechdom Recipes

I'm finally reading through my copy of Pollington's Leechcraft, which contains translations of three Old English leechdoms: the Lacnunga, the OE Herbal, and Bald's Leechdom.  I picked it up more for an interest in the charms, but then in Bald, something caught my eye. One remedy called for seasoned hen, boiled with cabbage/kale, and served to the invalid with good broth.  Chicken soup!

Now, there is an Anglo-Saxon cookbook out there; Duke Sir Cariadoc has written a negative review of it.  One flaw among several is the author's use of leechdom cures to authenticate her dishes, when the dishes look almost nothing like the leechdom cures 'authenticating' them.  I want to avoid that.

A quick tour through the Lacnunga last night turned up enough potential recipes for a meal, although not for a cookbook.  Some hew closer to the original cures than others:

• Honey Butter Beets: one cure calls for beets (unclear if root, leaf, or both) "boiled" in honey and butter.  Assuming this is some sort of saute, rather than literal immersion in a vat of boiling butter (frying), that's doable.
• Radish Digestif: Sliced radish sprinkled with salt, served with small amount of vinegar to sip.  Original cure (for heaviness of the stomach) did not say to slice the radish, but otherwise the same.
• Blackberry Drink: "Give him crushed bramble berries [blackberries] to drink."  We can do that!  I'd probably thin it out with some water to make more of an agua fresca and less of a smoothie, but could do either.
• Pepper-Wine Sauce: Original is an ointment, just pepper in wine, smeared on.  Pepper the wine and cook to reduce it, and you have a nice sauce for meat.
• Mashed Parsnips with Ale: Original had the (raw?) parsnip pounded and left to soak in ale or wine overnight, and then drunk by the patient.  Could be a raw parsnip salad, but I think I lean towards warm mashed parsnips flavored with a bit of ale.
• Celery Egg Salad: Okay, this starts to go farther afield.  The original cure was a salve: wild celery leaves, raw egg whites and vinegar, smeared on.  Chopped celery leaves, chopped cooked egg whites, and a vinegar dressing sounds like a reasonable salad.
• Beet Leaf Omelette: Also farther afield.  The original called for an egg-based poultice to be wrapped in beet leaves. If one used beetroot for the honey butter beets, one could put the beet greens into an egg dish (perhaps a tart?).
• Asparagus and Kale Saxondaise: This takes most of the food ingredients of a multi-step cure, which are in no way combined into a single dish but are rather 'layed on' in a particular order over several days.  Asparagus and kale are dressed in a Hollandaise-like sauce of egg yolks and bacon fat, seasoned with smoked salt.  (The original called for an eggshell-full of salt to the burnt, and the burnt salt used.  You could try this also.).  There is another cure that calls for a raw egg, soaked in vinegar for three days, to be beaten with butter, set a little over the coals (to thicken?) and then served.  So the idea of an egg-thickened custard or sauce isn't impossible.

With either some roast pork or beef for the pepper-wine sauce, or else Bald's chicken soup, and also some pottage or bread, you have the makings of a nice meal here, I think.  Not all at once - that's a lot of vegetable dishes.

There were a few others I'm not recalling (but that I wrote down), and there's still two leechdoms to go through.  

A Viking Meal: Part 2

Work the night of the dinner:

• Emptied blackberries into strainer in a bowl to drain.  (Should have used the juice for the beverage!)
• Cut the pork shoulder into "morsels" per the recipe (~0.5" cubes).  Belatedly realized that boiled fat, while yummy to nutrition-starved Vikings, was not so yummy to us.  Trimmed fat from the meat.
• Briefly and partially browned the meat in two batches in a skillet; transferred to pot, covered with water.  Brought to boil, down to simmer.
• While meat boiling: Melted half stick of butter (which was half of what the recipe said, if I did the conversions right) and added mustard; stirred while it foamed for a minute or so.  Added chopped scallions, sauteed for a few minutes.  Added salt pork (out of order from the recipe - I wasn't sure I'd be able to fry it per their instructions once all the kale was in), fried it.  Added chopped kale in batches.
• The recipe called for equal weights of pork and kale.  I got one pound of kale into the pan and decided that was plenty of kale.  This was a good decision.
• Removed greens from heat.  Tested pork; it was done.  Removed from heat, fished pork out of stock. Meat wasn't tough!
• This all took ~30-45 min.  The wheat would take 30-40 min to cook, and I had 1.5 hours before guests arrived.  
• In the next hour, I pulled leaves off of an entire clamshell of thyme, put the turnips into water and heated it up once so it wouldn't take long to boil later, transferred ricotta and blackberries into nice bowls, tidied up the dining room.
• T-minus 30 minutes, added 2 cups of stock to the greens. Put some thyme in a tea-ball, put in with turnips. Brought stew and turnips up to a boil.  Added wheat to stew, reduced to simmer. Cooked both ~40 min, adding pork back in to stew at 30 min mark.
• Mashed turnips; drained liquid; added 1-2 Tb butter. Served it forth.
• Transferred stew to serving bowl. Stirred thyme into stew.
• Honey drink: ~1/4 c. honey in 12 oz hot water; dilute with ~36 oz cold water and 2 sippy boxes of apple juice.

Results

Boar Stew: Two thumbs up! Good porky flavor, nice balance with greens, wheat provided good chew.  Stupid thyme was totally worth the effort, added good flavor.  Questions on whether this could be a feast or camp meal - might be worth trying a one-pot version.

Buttered Turnips: Were buttered turnips. Perfectly acceptable, but nobody's going to be asking for the leftovers. I don't think the teaball of thyme made much of an impression.

Cheese and Berries with Honey: Simple, light and fresh-tasting. Apparently my years-long objection to ricotta only applies to Mom's Inside-Out Manacotti.

Honey Drink: Sweet, with just a small acid note from the apple juice.  Straw color, slightly cloudy from juice - looked reasonably mead-y in a glass horn.  Better than the oxymel last year, but unremarkable. I think this dinner really wanted beer.

 

A Viking Meal: Part 1

I am cooking the annual SENEA dinner, taking some pages from An Early Meal (AEM).  The AEM recipes are for four, and I'm having 5-6, so I doubled them. Le menu:

• Boar Stew (AEM)
• Boiled Turnips (AEM)
• Cheese with Berries and Honey
• Honey Drink (Ann Hagen)

And Lady Sabine is bringing some bread.

Boar Stew

Had I gotten my act together earlier, I could have had boar and wheat berries for this.  As it is, we're having pork shoulder (2 lb, darker, more flavorful than pork loin) and einkorn wheat (1 lb box purchased).  Einkorn is an ancient wheat variety that was mutated or cross-bred into bread wheat.  I could not find wheat berries for love or money, even in Whole Foods.  I used to be able to buy them at Weis.  Maybe they are no longer 'on trend'?  The dish also calls for kale (2 lb) and wild leeks (1+ lb, although it trimmed down to less).  I don't know how wild leek compares to cropleek, but the picture for this dish looks as much like a pottage as a stew - everything cut rather small.  Big inch-wide rounds of cropleek didn't seem to go, so I bought spring onions/scallions.  There was no pancetta at the store, but there was salt pork (4-5 oz), and my Internetting tells me that those are approximately equivalent?  I mean, bacon would have worked, too. The recipe also called for ground mustard seed (3 Tb) and fresh thyme.

Night before prep:

• Chopped spring onions. Should I have used all of the green leaves?  I usually stop when the leaves go all hollow.
• I bought bags of pre-cut kale, so that's done
• Chopped the salt pork
• Ground mustard seeds in a mortar 
• Meant to chop up pork shoulder but did not get to it

Turnips

One of those "no duh" recipes.  Boil turnips (3 lb), mash with butter.  I cut the root tip off of a turnip while I did some other prep, and it didn't seem to turn brown. So I peeled and chopped my turnips.

Cheese with Berries and Honey

The dessert course. I thought about making fresh cheese, but just punted and bought 28 oz of ricotta.  I got frozen blackberries (2 lb) rather than fresh - first, less expensive. But second and more importantly, the frozen ones are usually smaller and more flavorful than the big but watery fresh ones, and closer to the wild blackberries my grandpa used to pick.  Wildflower honey.  It's just all going on the table and folks can have what they like from it - plain berries, berries on cheese, cheese with honey, etc.  My prep here was just to leave the bags of berries in the fridge to thaw.

Honey Drink

Ann Hagen suggests, in one of her Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England books, that an unfermented drink of water boiled with honey may have been drunk as well as fermented mead.  I could have made Mistress Sorcha's quick mead recipe if I'd thought about it ahead of time, but I didn't, so... honey drink.

I go back and forth with serving this or cold maythe (chamomile) tea.I like chamomile, but a lot of people don't.  Also, it's not at all clear that a tincture of maythe would have been drunk as a beverage.

Pennsic XLV: Camping report

My camp

I camped by myself this year, as an experiment.

Set-Up/Tear Down

This took longer than I think it should have, partly because I'm still learning to set up the tent, but mostly because of the ridiculous heat and humidity. I had to take a lot of breaks.  5-6 hours to set everything up, 3-4 to tear it down.

Tent

Tent was awesome, with plenty of room to store all my gear - even the folded-up EZ-Up I ended up not using.  And really, almost ALL - the first time it rained, I dragged everything inside except the table and the 0g chair.  We had reasonable rain - no crazy storms, but not just drizzle, either - and everything was dry.  I did cut a tarp to fit as a ground cloth - so the brown one is the one to use from here on out.

Stake tent corners, then up center pole, THEN stake sides. 

Oriental rug (4x6?) + double IKEA run (3x4) covered most of the floor. An old bathmat at the foot of the cot gave me a place to put the cast iron where I wouldn't have to worry about rust stains on the canvas.

Day Shade

The 9x12 painter's tarp worked nicely for a day shade. (Note to self: Do not face front of tent towards the south.)  I tied it to the tent and to some old poles, staked them down, and boom.  A few days in, it seemed saggy, so I took a fourth pole, put a mess kit pot on it to soften the point, and used it to push up the roof a little.  It would have helped if I could have run my guy lines out at wider angles, but that would've been in someone else's space.  It seemed to keep things 'dry enough.'  I wouldn't do calligraphy under it, or leave an important book out, but I could step out of my tent and make coffee without getting soaked, which was the goal.

I used a large linen tablecloth at one point, clothespinned on, to help block out more sun.

Sump

Digging through the matted roots in Pennsylvania clay with a hand trowel was hard.  I got a blister (wear gloves!).  But once through that, the clay was just powder I scraped and scraped until it was big enough.  I didn't measure the hole, but I'd say 6" x 6" x 6-8" deep, maybe? It seemed to hold around a quart and met my wastewater needs.

Food and Drink

I have to sort of throw my hands in the air.  I ate some of what I brought, but didn't touch a lot of it. I planned a lot of chicken stew - which it was too hot for me to want to eat.  I ate a lot of cold salami and cheese, though.  Bob's Red Mill mueseli with milk and fruit and hazelnuts made good breakfasts - and on the one morning that it was cold, I could heat it up on the stove.

One gallon/day for washing seemed about right, but +1 gallon for every load of laundry.  4-6 bottles of water/day, I'd say.  The trick is that when I'm out of camp, I'll drink what I bring with me (usually two bottles) but then I'll have to buy or cadge water until I'm back in camp.  I had to buy Gatorade powder at the Cooper Store - I was really feeling the need for it, but hadn't brought any of my own.

Making a fire with just me never quite seemed worth it, especially in the mornings. Last year's bread-making worked because I had committed to doing nothing all War.  This year, I had morning commitments at 11am or earlier all week, and I didn't want to stress/rush through bread-making, fire putting-outing, clean up, and get to commitment.

New favorite thing: Make coffee, drink coffee.  Make coffee again, pour coffee into Goat Story horn.  Let coffee cool on ground while finish getting ready for the day. Put coffee in cooler.  When I get back to camp in the afternoon - iced coffee, ready to drink!

The bigger cooler was not as labor-saving as I'd hoped.  I started off with a 10-lb block, and I needed more the next day - got a 7lb bag of cubes because it was easy to carry.  The next day, I got 2 10-lb blocks, and those lasted that day and the next - but it took a few days to get the cooler full enough of melt water to have the thermal mass to fend off the heat.  With as much as I was out of camp anyway, I probably could have just used the small cooler and gotten ice daily.  Would have saved space in the car.

Sanitation

Pitcher + bowl worked great, actually.  I washed down with soap and water on Day 1, but ended up with a sticky soap residue all over on Day 2, even after 'rinsing' repeatedly with my 'rinse' washcloth.  (I used one with soap to wash, and one with water to rinse.)  After that, I washed my hands with soap, but the rest of me just got scrubbed with a wet washcloth. I felt clean (and the one day I skipped this - Wednesday night, before I left - I was itchy the next day, which I attribute to not having washed).  My hair didn't look nearly as bad as I'd feared.  I wet it down every day, too, and it ended up looking like I hadn't washed it for a day. Considering that I hadn't washed it for five days, that's not bad!  And it was usually under a coif, veil or hat.

My sister clued me in to the absorbing bags they sell for Luggable Loo.  Somewhat more private than dragging the thing to the privy to empty it, but they do have a kinda weird smell.  (The lid keeps the smell in, so it doesn't fill the tent, but it hits you when you use it.)  You can also buy those blue deodorizing pellets to help with that, but... trying to buy less gear, here.  I'm waffling on which approach I prefer.

The 'kitchen sink' we bought a few years ago finally got used. It's two folding plastic cubes, one for hot water (wash) and one for cold (rinse).  I'd put hot water and a few drops of dish soap into one, wash the dishes, put them in the other, and pour water from the pitcher on them individually to rinse.  Given that it was just me and not an entire Scout troop, this seemed to make sense.

True to the hype, my linen gowns could absolutely be reworn after an airing, even after pretty hot and sweaty days.  I did a load of laundry part-way through, just socks and bras (which I was short on).  I had enough underwear and bike shorts to get through without laundry.  I had four linen gowns and wore them all, generally on their own. At night, I wore both my red Frankish gown and a wool cloak at different times.  I wore my leather hood one cool night.  Two days, I schlepped around in linen pants and cotton shirts.

Health

Even with bike shorts all the time, I still ended up with some heat rash.  Not too bad though - I kept it powdered and it didn't hurt so much I couldn't walk.

Toe scrape on an iron tent stake - kept it washed (with soap) and bandaged (Band Aid with antibiotic ointment already in the pad) and it didn't infect.

CPAP battery got charged to full each day, even when it started to get cloudy.  The solar panel and battery (in its nylon case) even got rained on one day, and they were fine.

Furnishings

Cot + camp mat = perfect.  Maybe I could do without the camp mat, but it's just awesome with it.  Being higher makes the tent seem smaller (have to move in from the edge to cope with slanted wall) but then I get storage space underneath, which I totally used.

Folding side table = adequate. Even with the elastics at the corners, the top surface doesn't stay flat.  But it can hold jewelry, books, etc.  Just not anything that has to stay level.

Folding stool = useful.  Sometimes seating, sometimes a stand for the CPAP.

0g chair = not used enough to justify. Last year, when my highest goal was to see how long I could do nothing, this chair was the bomb.  This year, I didn't kick back and chill in it hardly at all.  A regular folding camp chair would have been good enough, and would have packed way smaller.

Table = somewhat small.  I could generally to any two out of three: cook, food prep, clean up.  Not sure the additional convenience of not having to juggle would be worth the additional gear. Also, the day shade probably would not have fit another table.

Food trunk = too heavy. Picturesque, but oy.  Tough to shift around.

Accessories chest = just right.

Clothes Rubbermaid = ugly but useful. Garb guaranteed dry (I Kondo'ed my gowns, rolling them and standing them up, and I could see my wardrobe at a glance) and I put the pitcher and bowl on top when I did my evening wash-up.  Maybe I could paint it or, at a minimum, throw a cloth over it.

Sardines

I've had a tin of sardines in my cupboard since at least last Pennsic.  I resolved to try them after reading about sustainable fishing and suchlike things.  As they come in handy, shelf-stable tins, they'd also make good camp provisions.  I don't know that sardines were available in the North, but Random Small Fish certainly were.

I only just got around to trying them, because... sardines!  Never had them as a kid, and only ever saw them in cartoons, generally in an unflattering light.  Nobody writes glossy food magazine articles about canned sardines.  What if they were really stinky and fishy and yucky?

We fired up the grill for the first time this year, so I decided to slap them on down.  If they stunk, it would stay outside.  I put them on a little tray of foil - I bought a can of 'boneless, skinless' sardines, trying to lower the barrier to consumption.

Verdict: Edible!  Not delicious, but edible.  They reminded me very strongly of the canned salmon of my youth, the stuff Mom always made into "burgers" with eggs and breadcrumbs.  Kind of fishy, but not overwhelmingly so.  I may grow to appreciate them in time, and I think I'll bring some to Pennsic.

One small tin (~3 fingers wide? I didn't note the weight) contained 4 sardines, which made a reasonable protein portion of a meal.  

Game birds roasting on an open fire

Doing my usual shilly-shallying about my entries.  Is the casting too modern?  (See next post.)  Should I cook instead?

What I would cook: roasted small birds and flatbread, based on the Bayeux tapestry:

Possibly flatbreads cooked on a grill or griddle

Meat chunks and small birds on spits on some sort of firepit

 

I've experimented with cooking flatbreads already.  Ann Hagen has some good information on bread and its preparation.  There's a reference to kneading dough, although I have to wonder if the high-moisture "mix and let sit" method is more practical for cooking for literally an army.  I could do both, not hard.

I looked up 'roast chicken over campfire' to see about that.  Everyone said, cut holes through the spit and use a skewer to secure the meat.  Made sense, but I didn't see it in the picture above.  But then I looked at the other picture of bird-on-a-stick in the tapestry:

Skewers!

Skewers, right through the legs!

The other thing that bothered me was that the cooking image shows the skewers nearly vertical, not horizontal like I'm used to seeing spits.  But - beer can chicken!  People do roast chickens vertically.  Some people think it's a better way to do it.  Certainly seems sensible, logistically - put your meat on your skewers, stick them in the ground in front of the fire.  No needing to find dozens of Y-shaped branches and set up giant rotisseries for the camp.  Makes serving easier (as shown), lets you pull the done ones when they're done, and let the others keep cooking. 

I'm looking into possible poultry now.  I'm thinking game birds - quail, partridge, squab.  Although it's not impossible (or even unlikely) that invading Normans could have knocked over someone's henhouse.  If the birds are the same scale as the hand in the image above, quail might be too small. (But they'd cook quickly and be adorable!)

 

Goat Story

I just couldn't say no.

Goat Story coffee mug

I bought a Goat Story coffee mug.  Because it looks like a drinking horn.  In black, the horrible plastic-ness of it is slightly less evident.  It is supposedly watertight, even upside down (as long as the coffee is not, I quote from the instructions it came with, "steaming hot," so... kinda hot? fairly warm?).  In theory, one could make coffee, put it in this, drive to the event, and drink it.  As opposed to making coffee and putting it in a Thermos and then putting it into a mug, or buying Starbucks, DD or McDs and doing the same.  (Or drinking out of the paper cup, which I'm pretty sure I've done a few times.)

Haven't test-driven it yet.  I'll check back with a review later.

Last bread post for a while

Ahead of the barony meeting last night, we did bread again.  Meisterin Johanna made some wheat breads - some plain, some enriched with eggs and honey and seeds.  Very tasty!

I went the less fancy route.  I made a loaf of rye and a batch of oatcakes.

Rye Bread

I forgot the recipe I'd found online.  I wasn't so sure about all of its particulars anyway, including the 8 Tb of sugar.  I know they had honey in the Middle Ages, but I just don't see it being an addition to daily bread. (Special bread, sure.)  So what I did was:

1. Make the pseudo-barm from Jas. Townsend: packet of instant yeast, 1 Tb flour, warm water, let sit.
2. Mix in a bowl: 2 c. whole wheat flour (King Arthur's White Whole Wheat), 1 c. rye flour, 1 tsp salt.
3. Add barm, then enough water to form dough (a bit more than 1 c., all told)
4. Knead; rise an hour; punch down and knead; bake.  Bake longer, because it was a dense and wet bread.

It's coarse (the rye is stone-ground) and... well, it's a reasonably good bread to put things on, almost crackery in flavor.  It is not a bread that makes me want to eat big slices of it. But seriously, what did I expect?  It's a heavy bread made with rye flour, which even in period was considered less desirable than wheat.

I possibly did not knead it enough, based on the springiness of Johanna's properly-kneaded dough. I think maybe I should just make a bunch of modern white bread loaves to understand bread basics, and then maybe come back to weird period variations.

*shire Oatcakes

North England - Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and others - have an oatcake tradition very different from the Scottish one I experimented with earlier.  These are soft floppy pancakes.  They are definitely griddled and also fit the description of "bread from oat flour cooked on a griddle" so I decided to try them, too. I used this recipe from My Kitchen Witch. 

1. Mix together 1.5 c. whole wheat flour and 1.5 c. "oatmeal."  Across the pond, I am getting the impression they have oat products like we have corn: flour, meal, coarse meal, etc. I used Bob's Red Mill oat flour, because I don't think porridge oats (steel cut oatmeal) is what was meant.  Pictures of the finished oatcakes don't show lumps of visible oats.
2. Mix in 2 tsp. salt and 1.5 tsp. yeast.
3. In separate bowl, combine 2 c. hot water and 2 c. cold milk to make 4 c. warm dilute milk.
4. Add to dry stuff and stir to combine. It forms a watery batter.
5. Cover with plastic wrap and put in fridge overnight.

Other recipes just let it sit out for an hour or so. I wonder if that might be better? I am not sure how well the yeast did after refrigeration.  It thickened slightly as the oats absorbed some water, but it was still a very thin batter - thinner than my pancake batter.

In the morning, I made a pair of oatcakes in a greased skillet. They seemed to cook up okay.  They stayed soft and gooshy in the middle, and I wasn't sure if that was because I undercooked them or if it was because of the soluble fiber in the oats.  They were bland, and greatly helped with some cheese and/or egg.  (They are traditionally used as a breakfast-on-the-go wrapper.)

I put the remaining batter back in the fridge until 3pm. It then sat out on the counter from 3pm until 6pm, when I made the rest of the oatcakes. The batter was barely bubbly in the bowl, although it bubbled okay when it cooked.  Johanna thought she could taste raw flour in one, so I started cooking them longer. That helped (and overall improved the taste) but also made them salty where they cooked to crispness. (And this time, I did not use salted butter to cook with!) Keeping a little bit of a gooshy center seemed to help take the edge off the salt, as Mistress Graciela pointed out when she arrived for the meeting and had a taste-test. 

I used a cold one to wrap around eggs and cheese this morning. It was fine.  It's not exactly a flavor taste sensation, much like a plain tortilla isn't.  But it inoffensively does the job it's meant to do.  Also, it would be really really easy to make over a campfire.