Staffordshire Oatcakes – a Potteries tradition going strong
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 977 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In our world of globalised food, there are few things that have remained true local specialities, and the Staffordshire oatcake is one of them. This oatmeal, yeasted pancake is an institution in Stoke-on-Trent and surrounding area, but still hardly anyone beyond the Midlands seems to have heard of them. The oatcake has a history stretching back hundreds of years as a staple food for workers of the Staffordshire Potteries – it then suffered a dip in popularity from the 1960s which led to concerns about its future, but today we hear reports that local production is healthy, and even going up.
In the programme Leyla Kazim visits oatcake bakers in Stoke to hear how they’re keeping this much-loved local staple going strong. And we catch up with Glenn Fowler, the owner of the very last traditional ‘hole in the wall’ shop which closed in 2012, to find out how this Stoke institution lives on through its recipe. But as demand goes up, this is driving more automated production, so what could that mean for the traditional methods and the long-established recipes? And it is time for this overlooked oatmeal pancake to finally gain nationwide appeal?
Presented by Leyla Kazim and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.3 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:19.8 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.4 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.7 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:44.6 | Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. |
| 0:49.7 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. |
| 0:54.7 | We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:57.8 | For me, it's not often that I come across a food that I have quite literally never heard of before. In our |
| 1:04.6 | globalized food culture there aren't many things that have remained true local |
| 1:09.3 | specialties and this is one of them. The O'cake is the ocake I think still content will always |
| 1:16.3 | have them. The simplicity of it is why we're still talking about o'cakes today and |
| 1:22.1 | often simple food are the ones that become iconic. |
| 1:25.5 | Yeah it does cottage industry and stoke on trend it's still small it's personal and |
| 1:30.6 | the oak case are unique to each individual shop. |
| 1:34.0 | People love them, bacon and cheese, just roll it up and that's it. |
| 1:38.0 | Breakfast, dinner and tea. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.