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Oat-Meal Mush
To two quarts boiling water, well salted, add one and a half cups best oat meal (Irish, Scotch, Canadian or Akron are best); stir in meal by degrees, and after stirring up a few times to prevent its settling down in a mass at the bottom, leave it to cook three hours without stirring. While stirring in meal put inner kettle directly on stove. (Cook in a custard-kettle with water in outer kettle). Το cook for breakfast it may be put on over night, allowing it to boil an hour or two in the evening, but it is better when freshly cooked. Serve with cream and sugar. This is unsurpassed as a breakfastdish, especially for growing children, who need bone and muscleproducing food. To be wholesome it must be well cooked, and not the pasty, half-cooked mass usually served at boarding-houses. There are a few persons with very delicate digestive powers, who should eat oat-meal only when thoroughly pearled, as the outer husks of the grain irritate the coatings of the stomach. In lieu of a custard-kettle the mush may be made in a pan or small tin bucket, and then placed in a steamer and steamed two hours.
A double-boiler porridge from the era when oatmeal meant coarsely cut grain, not rolled flakes. The proportions and the three hours only make sense if you use the right oats.
- The oats"Best oat meal" here means steel-cut or pinhead oats — the groat chopped into fragments. Akron was a milling town in Ohio; Irish, Scotch and Canadian meals were the imported benchmarks. Rolled oats, which came into general use later, will turn to glue over three hours and need about 5 minutes instead.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler: an inner vessel set inside an outer one holding water. The instruction to put the inner kettle directly on the stove while stirring in the meal is to get the mixture hot fast; it then goes back over the water bath so the bottom cannot scorch during the long unstirred cook.
- The ratioTwo quarts water to a cup and a half of oats is roughly 5:1 by volume — looser than a modern 4:1 porridge. That looseness is deliberate: over three hours in a water bath the grain absorbs nearly all of it and swells to a soft, glossy mush rather than a stiff one.
- Salt"Well salted" is unquantified here; a teaspoon per quart, so roughly two teaspoons total, is a reasonable modern reading. Salt added to the water at the start seasons the grain throughout; added at the end it only sits on the surface.
- Three hoursNot an exaggeration for steel-cut oats in a water bath, where the mixture never exceeds boiling and the starch breaks down slowly. Modern steel-cut oats cooked directly over heat with stirring are done in 25–30 minutes; the long method gives a creamier, less grainy result but is not required for edibility.
- The overnight versionThe recipe offers boiling an hour or two at night and finishing in the morning as an option, while admitting it is better freshly cooked. If you do this, cool the pot promptly and refrigerate it rather than leaving cooked cereal at room temperature all night as the original assumes.
- "Thoroughly pearled"Pearled grain has had the bran and outer husk abraded off, leaving the starchy centre. The advice for delicate digestions amounts to using a refined rather than whole grain — a distinction most cooks now reverse.
- Steamer alternativeA pan or tin bucket set in a steamer for two hours works the same way as the double boiler: moist heat capped at 212°F, no direct contact with the fire.
- YieldAbout two quarts of finished mush, which serves six to eight generously with cream and sugar.
Oatmeal's arrival as an American breakfast staple owed much to Scottish and Irish immigration and to the rise of commercial milling in the 1870s and 1880s — Akron, Ohio, named here alongside Irish and Scotch meals, was home to some of the largest oat mills in the country and later a founding centre of the Quaker Oats combine. Buckeye Cookery, an Ohio book, would have had good reason to name the local product as an equal to the imports. The insistence that the mush be cooked long and thoroughly, with the swipe at "the pasty, half-cooked mass usually served at boarding-houses," reflects a real contemporary complaint: coarse-cut oats need hours of gentle heat, and rushed cooking left the grain chalky at the centre. The claim that oatmeal is "bone and muscle-producing food" for growing children belongs to the popular nutritional writing of the period, which ranked foods by their supposed tissue-building properties long before vitamins were identified.