Bannock or fry bread
Form: Pancake or flat bread
Country of origin: North America
What distinguishes it from other methods of bread making: Some are rolled around a long willow branch and baked; others are fried
Category of bread: (2 and 7) Flat bread common to all North Amerindian populations, similar to the Mexican tortilla, counting a remarkable number of cousins all over the world
Particularity: Initially a corn cake, and now prepared using oats, barley and wheat
Ingredients: Wheat flour; cornmeal; baker’s yeast; fat; salt; water
North America
Bannock is truly the bread of the American Indians, from Alaska to the various territories that today make up the United States. Specialists have great discussions as to whether the native Americans actually knew bread before the arrival of the Europeans, or whether the Navajos learned how to make it when they were held prisoner in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid died in 1881. They might simply have watched their British jailers making bannocks.
This double origin – Irish and Scottish and American Indian – make the bannock a “hyphenated” bread, which surely makes it all the dearer to those on either side of the Atlantic who relish it so much. There are thousands of variations of this corn, barley, oat and, today, wheat cake. Each region of the British Isles and each people of North America has added its own touch. It is said, however, that Scottish bannocks are by far the most cherished, such as the Selkirk Bannock, containing many varieties of raisins. Due to a certain baker by the name of Robbie Douglas, it was made forever popular when Queen Victoria, stopping in Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott’s niece, had bannock with her tea.
The primitive way of cooking it was in ashes and hot embers, although it was sometimes fried. More rare was to wrap the bannock around a willow branch, shaping it lengthwise, and holding it in front of the fire. These original bannocks from the American side of the Atlantic are still found, but are rare these days. The johnnycakes, eaten from the northeast coast of the U.S. and as far south as the Caribbean and the corn dodger, a type of cornmeal cake, are certainly modern manifestations of the bannock.