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MILK PORRIDGE (another way)
The following is a quicker and easier way of preparing porridge for children's breakfasts, suppers, etc. Mix a dessert-spoonful of the medium oatmeal to a smooth paste with cold milk. Pour on half a pint of boiling milk, and stir the mixture over the fire till it thickens. Sweeten it and serve hot.
A single-serving oatmeal gruel thinned with milk rather than water, meant to be made in minutes rather than soaked overnight. The proportions are very loose by modern standards.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, a little over a US cup. American cooks measuring 8 oz will get a noticeably thicker result.
- Dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, conventionally about 2 teaspoons. That is a thin drinking porridge; for a bowl you want closer to 3 tablespoons of oatmeal to the same milk.
- Medium oatmealA medium grind of cut oats, coarser than fine oatmeal but finer than pinhead, and not rolled oats or oat flour. Steel-cut oats pulsed briefly in a grinder are the nearest substitute; rolled oats will not disperse into a paste the same way and give a slimier texture.
- The cold-milk pasteThis is the hinge. Slaking the meal with cold milk first is what prevents lumps when the boiling milk hits it, exactly as with a roux-free sauce. Skip it and the grain seizes into knots that no amount of stirring will break up.
- Milk scorchesMilk boiled directly over heat catches on the pan base and the burnt taste carries through everything. Use a heavy pan, moderate heat, and keep the spoon moving across the bottom.
- Thickening timeMedium oatmeal needs longer than the recipe implies. Expect 8 to 10 minutes of gentle simmering after it thickens, or the grain stays chalky in the middle.
- YieldOne child's portion, or a small bowl for an adult. Scale directly.
Milk porridge sits in the long British tradition of grain gruels served to children, invalids and the very old, where oatmeal cooked in milk rather than water was regarded as the more nourishing and more digestible form. Cassell's offers this version frankly as "another way", a quicker alternative to the method that precedes it, suited to a busy household. The distinction between coarse, medium and fine oatmeal mattered a great deal in the period, when oats came from the miller by grind rather than in branded packets, and rolled oats, which reached British kitchens from America towards the end of the nineteenth century, had not yet displaced cut meal. The instruction to sweeten it and nothing more is characteristic: sugar, or sometimes treacle, was the whole seasoning, and salt is often associated with the Scottish tradition, where sweetened porridge was said to be viewed with some suspicion.