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Steamed Oat-Meal
To one tea-cup oat-meal add one quart cold water, tea-spoon salt, put in steamer over a kettle of cold water, and steam one hour and a half after meal begins to cook.
A plain double-boiler porridge from the era before rolled oats were common. The ratio and the vessel are the whole recipe, so both are worth reading carefully.
- Which oatmealIn an 1870s kitchen "oat-meal" means coarse or medium cut oats — what is now sold as steel-cut or Irish oatmeal. Rolled oats were only beginning to reach households at this date and would turn to paste under ninety minutes of steam.
- The ratioOne teacup to one quart is roughly 1 part oats to 5 parts water by volume (a teacup runs a little under a standard cup). That is looser than modern steel-cut directions.
- Steamer over cold waterThe point is indirect heat. A metal or ceramic bowl set in a covered pot of simmering water, or the top of a double boiler, does the same job. Oats cooked this way cannot scorch or stick, which is why the method survived so long for breakfast grain.
- "After meal begins to cook"Start timing the hour and a half from when the water in the lower kettle is boiling and the oats are visibly hot, not from the moment the pot goes on the stove. Starting from cold water, expect the better part of two hours in total.
- Top up the kettleA kettle boiling that long will run dry. Keep a second pot of hot water going and replenish the lower vessel as needed, adding hot water rather than cold so the timing holds.
- Shortening itSteel-cut oats simmered directly in a heavy pan reach the same texture in 25 to 30 minutes with occasional stirring. The long steam is for a hands-off, unscorchable porridge with a softer, more uniform grain, not for extra flavour.
- YieldAbout 4 cups cooked, enough for four breakfast servings. Leftovers set firm when chilled and can be sliced and fried in butter the next morning.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, the same decade that steel-cut and, soon after, rolled oats began moving from Scottish and Irish immigrant kitchens into general American breakfast use — oats had long been thought of in the United States mainly as horse feed. The steamer method here reflects two facts of the period: coarse-cut oats genuinely need long cooking, and a wood or coal range held a slow, steady background heat all morning for nothing extra, so a pot could sit over a kettle indefinitely. Packaged milled oats arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, a generation before boxed flaked cereals took over.