Doctor Johnson proposed to define the word ‘oats’ thus: ‘A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ And I replied: ‘Aye, and that’s why England has such fine horses, and Scotland such fine people.

“You can serve them with butter and syrup (Golden Syrup is best, but maple is fine)”

Sweet fillings? Good lord no. It’s got to be streaky bacon with the rind on and lots of fat. The bacon fat/oatcake interface is the point of the whole thing.

When I was a youth, the best oatcake shop around, Stanley’s, had a larger-than-lifesize painting of a perfect oatcake-based meal propped up in the shop window. Thanks to the artist’s choice of medium – household gloss paint on hardboard – the sausages, bacon, black pudding and fried egg that lay on the oatcake glistened in a hyper-lifelike manner.

My recipe for awsome pancakes/waffles:

Mash up some bananas, and blend them in with the milk, egg yolks and applesauce (don’t use oil; use applesauce). If you have any walnuts, pecans, almonds, etc., crush them and mix them in. Whip the egg whites to a fluffy merenge (sp?), and fold that in. If you’re making waffles, oil the waffle-maker a bit more than usual, because there is no oil in the batter.

“For every type, the oats first undergo cleaning, hulling, and conditioning, which removes the outer shell (called a hull), leaving the inner kernel or oat groat…
From there, the whole oat groats are processed differently depending on what type of oatmeal they are being made into. Lincoln says that to make steel-cut oats (also known as Irish oats), the groats are chopped up with steel blades. “This allows for a chewier oatmeal,” says Lincoln. For Scottish oats, the groats are ground into a meal, which makes a “porridge-type oat with a nice, creamy texture….”