How to eat a flapjack

Today I had my first flapjack. If you’re an American, you may be thinking, “She’s in her 30s and she’s never had a pancake before, what kind of a childhood did she have?”

Fear not! OF COURSE I’ve had pancakes, I’m not a monster. What I mean is that today I had my first baked oat bar, studded with dried cranberries.

The flapjack is a close cousin of the granola bar, although it’s both softer and more dessert-like than what you’ll typically find stocked at the supermarket. As Extra Crispy (my favorite source of exclusively breakfast content) explains, the flapjack traditionally consists of oats, butter, brown sugar, and golden syrup, with the golden syrup giving it that distinctively cookie-like texture.

The word makes an appearance in William Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in which a character declares, "Come, thou shalt go home, and we'll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-days, and moreo'er puddings and flap-jacks, and thou shalt be welcome." (No one can resist the siren song of a flapjack, apparently.) But “flapjack” seems to have meant different things to Brits through the centuries, finally puffing up into its current agreeably oat-y form around the 1930s.

Today, I decided to buy one to eat while rambling through the golden fields of Hampstead Heath, a 790-acre London park that’s been showing up in British history books since the 10th century. Since people in English novels always seem to be wandering about either a heath or a moor of some kind, I was excited to see a heath in person.

This particular heath has a lot of tall grass perfect for lazing about in, and wooded paths dotted with blackberries that you could forage for as you walked. There were overjoyed dogs trotting about off-lead (not off-leash, I learned via signage) and splashing into lakes to fetch tennis balls; swimming ponds; and a brass band in a gazebo, playing everything from Shostakovich to hymns to corny old marches.

I posed my flapjack for a glamour shot in front of a glassy lake. But I waited to eat it until I got to the gazebo, where I kicked off my shoes and flopped into the grass with the other concertgoers. “Flapjacks are defiantly uncool,” one Guardian writer declares of the baked good. Honestly, so am I, and so was the euphonium solo of “Evermore” from the Beauty and the Beast remake that I was listening to. I ate the flapjack feeling a sense of solidarity with it, with the brass band, and with my fellow accidental concertgoers, all of us humbly making the most of an August Sunday afternoon.