October and, coming up to Halloween and Bonfire Night, thoughts turn to warming and comforting food and one of the best is a bowl of soup. It is not the ultimate comfort food in my world. That accolade has to go to oatcakes and cheese. Staffordshire oatcakes, not Scottish ones. The oatcakes that you used to be able to buy in many small shops on street corners in Stoke on Trent; the thin pancake like oatcakes made simply of oatmeal, salt and water and cooked on a griddle. The staple diet for breakfast and lunch for those living in Stoke in the 1950s and 60s when I was there and possibly so today. Oatcakes with melted cheese and perhaps tomatoes and mushrooms, with bacon and even sausages but the simplicity of oatcakes and cheese can sooth a pain, warm a cold day, fulfil a basic hunger, mend a broken heart. On a recent visit to West Wales to see family from Stoke on Trent I was not surprised to see a pack of oatcakes brought out of the freezer at lunch time. I know what a cousin in Germany would want to have taken over by any family visitors.
Today, though, it is soup. The house is filled with the smells of the various stages of soup production. Gently frying onions followed bt the more pungent chilli and garlicky aromas of a minestrone soup bubbling away on the stove. Finished with a grating of a good parmesan it makes an unorthodox Sunday lunch but just what is needed on a chilly October day.
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