Celebrating Oatcakes

North Staffordshire's regional cuisine, Oatcakes, are something to be extremely proud of.

​If you live in Stoke, you probably take oatcakes for granted. Everyone has their favourite oatcake shop and their preferred filling, and life wouldn’t be the same without them. But you don’t know how lucky you are. We poor exiles from Stoke hunger for the smell and taste of fresh oatcakes.

J B Oatcakes, Haywood, Tunstall

The Staffordshire Oatcake is a unique regional food, only found today in and around the Potteries. Outside Stoke people are more familiar with the Scottish oatcake, which, excellent though it is, has about as much in common with our oatcakes as porridge does – i.e. both are made with oats. For the reader who does not have the good fortune to be from Stoke, the Staffordshire Oatcake is a kind of savoury pancake about the size of a small dinner plate. It is bought from your local oatcake shop, each of which has its own, closely-guarded recipe. These small shops are almost all family-run, some in the same family for generations. I know of one which has been in the same family since 1934. If a shop is sold, the recipe is part of the deal.

Growing up in Stoke-on-Trent, the oatcake was part of my life, and it was only when I moved away that I realised they were virtually unobtainable outside my home town. Trips home may have been notionally undertaken to visit relatives and friends, but the purchase of oatcakes to bring home for the freezer was always part of the itinerary. Not the same as fresh, but an adequate substitute when needs must.

Oatcakes are cooked on a griddle, and traditionally hand-poured, but some shops have retro-fitted ingenious machines to pour the mixture, each one crafted to fit the existing griddle, like a Wallace and Grommit creation. These machines come from a tradition of precision engineering in the Potteries which complimented the pottery, brick-making, steel and mining industries - a tradition which produced the designer of the Spitfire, Reginald Mitchell.

If Stoke was in France they I feel sure oatcakes would have their own protected status of origin like French cheeses. The shops too are real treasures. The corner shop where you knew the owner and they knew all their customers has all but disappeared, but you can be sure of a warm welcome and a catch-up on the gossip in your local oatcake shop.

​​I have come to realise how extraordinary it is that these shops still exist today, many of them only open Thursday to Sunday. One or two larger-scale enterprises have been started in recent years, but the small shop owners still dominate. A surprising number of these are still in business, and I wonder for how much longer there will be people still willing to get up in the middle of the night to make their 'mix' for the coming day in the traditional way. So enjoy your oatcakes while you can, and support your local shop!

David Fletcher is a documentary photographer, based in the New Forest, originally from Stoke-on-Trent. This feature on Oatcakes was published in The Guardian. You can follow his work on Instagram and see more photos of Oatcakes and Oatcake sellers on his website.