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Milk Porridge
Put into an enamelled saucepan half a pint of whole groats, on which pour a pint and a half of cold water. Boil well for two or three hours, adding more water if too thick, and strain through a colander or sieve. This porridge may be kept two or three days, and when wanted boiling milk should be added. Probable cost, without milk, 3d.
This is thin invalid-and-nursery porridge rather than the stiff bowl of modern oatmeal: the grain is boiled to collapse, strained, and stored as a base to be let down with hot milk at the moment of serving.
- Whole groatsGroats are hulled oat kernels with the bran intact — sold today as oat groats or whole oats, not rolled oats or steel-cut. By the imperial pint of the period, half a pint of groats is a little over a cup and the pint and a half of water a little over three cups — about one part grain to three of water — and you will need more as it swells.
- The enamelled pan mattersBare cast iron or unlined copper will discolour a long-simmered cereal and give it a metallic edge. Enamelled cast iron, stainless steel or a heavy nonstick pan all serve; a heavy base is the real point, since a thin one scorches over two hours.
- Two or three hours is not a misprintWhole groats will soften in 50 to 60 minutes, but this recipe wants them broken down entirely so the starch passes through the sieve. Stir often toward the end and keep the heat very low once it thickens.
- Straining is the hingeWhat goes through the colander is the point of the dish — a smooth, starchy oat cream. Push it through with the back of a ladle and discard the bran and unbroken grain left behind; if you skip this step you have ordinary porridge, not this.
- Storage, revised"May be kept two or three days" assumed a cold larder and a bowl of grain nobody worried about. Cooked cereals held at room temperature can grow Bacillus cereus, whose toxin survives reheating, so refrigerate the strained base within an hour and use it inside two days.
- Adding the milkBring the milk to a boil separately and beat it into the cold base, then return the lot briefly to the heat. Adding cold milk to cold porridge and warming the two together gives a gluey result; the proportion is to taste, roughly equal parts for a drinkable consistency.
- Yield and servingA cup of groats strains down to roughly three cups of base, depending on how much extra water goes in — three or four servings once milk is added. Salt is not mentioned but is wanted; sugar, honey or a scrape of nutmeg belongs at the table rather than in the pot.
- That "3d"Threepence for the whole batch, without the milk, shows how cheap the dish was; Cassell's routinely gives a probable cost, of the kind a household could check kitchen accounts against.
Milk porridge belonged to the sick-room and the nursery as much as to the morning table: a strained oat liquor was standard invalid diet in Victorian households, gentle enough for a weak stomach and cheap enough to be made in quantity and drawn on for days. Oats had long been the staple grain of Scotland and the north of England, where whole groats were boiled for hours in an iron pot; the refinement here is the sieve, which turns a peasant porridge into something closer to the gruels and barley waters prescribed by nineteenth-century doctors. The habit of adding boiling milk at the last moment may well have been practical as much as culinary — before reliable refrigeration, milk was often the ingredient that spoiled first, so it is easy to see why the grain base would be kept and the milk bought fresh.