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Steamed Oat Meal Pudding
Put to soak over night, one coffee-cup of oat meal in one and one half cups cold water; in the morning add a little salt and one pint of rich boiling milk, put in a pan and steam two hours. When, done wet cups and fill. Eat with sweetened cream.
A plain steamed cereal pudding of the sort that doubled as breakfast and as a nursery dessert. It hinges on the overnight soak and on the oatmeal being coarse rather than rolled.
- Coffee-cupPeriod cup measures are inconsistent; a coffee cup is variously reckoned at a full half-pint (about a modern cup) or somewhat less, with the teacup usually the smaller vessel. Treat it as 3/4 to 1 cup of oatmeal against the recipe's 1 1/2 cups of water and 1 pint (2 cups) of milk.
- Which oatmealIn books of this period "oat meal" often means coarse or steel-cut oats rather than the rolled flakes now standard, though rolled oats were already on the market. Steel-cut or pinhead oats are the safer choice if you want a set, grainy texture; rolled oats are likely to soften to a paste over an overnight soak plus two hours of steaming.
- "Steam" means a water bathPut the pan of soaked oats and hot milk inside a larger pot with an inch or two of simmering water, covered, or use a double boiler. Direct heat for two hours will scorch the milk on the bottom long before the grain is set.
- Rich milk"Rich" milk in this period was unskimmed and often had cream left in it. Whole milk works; whole milk with a few tablespoons of cream added is closer to the original.
- Why wet the cupsThe film of water keeps the hot pudding from gripping the china, so it turns out clean when inverted. Fill the cups while the pudding is still hot; the recipe does not say whether it was turned out warm or after standing to firm up.
- SeasoningThere is no sugar in the pudding itself, only salt. All the sweetness comes from the cream poured over at table, so sweeten that generously or the dish reads as porridge.
- YieldPerhaps four to six small molded cups, depending on the size of the moulds. Best eaten the day it is made, since the grain stiffens and the surface dries on standing.
Oatmeal is often said to have reached American cookbooks as an invalid and children's food before it was a breakfast staple, and this recipe sits on the hinge between the two: the method is the standard prescription for a long, gentle water-bath cooking of coarse grain that was thought easy to digest. Steel-cut oats needed hours of soaking and slow heat before the rolled and steamed flakes of the later 1870s and after cut the time down, and books of this era still assume the older grain. Molding the hot cereal in wetted cups and turning it out with sweetened cream is the same trick applied to blancmange, cornstarch pudding and hominy a plain porridge given the shape and service of a company dish, which is roughly how a thrifty household got dessert onto the table out of a pint of milk and a cup of grain.