Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oatmeal Porridge
Oatmeal Porridge
Put some water into a saucepan on the fire. Let it boil quickly, then throw in a pinch of salt. Sprinkle some oatmeal into the boiling water with the left hand, and at the same time beat it briskly with a fork held in the right to keep it from getting into lumps. When the porridge is sufficiently thick, draw the pan back a little, put on the lid, and simmer gently till wanted, or for about twenty minutes. Treacle, cream, milk, sugar, or butter may be eaten with it. The quantity of oatmeal will depend upon the taste of those who are to eat the porridge. Some people like it very thick, and others quite thin. Probable cost, 1d. per plateful. (See PORRIDGE, OATMEAL.)
A method rather than a formula: the book deliberately leaves the quantity to the eater. The one thing to fix before you start is what kind of oatmeal you are using, since the word meant something different in 1900 than it does on most supermarket shelves.
- Oatmeal, not oats"Oatmeal" here means the milled grain — pinhead (steel-cut) or, more likely for porridge, medium or coarse ground meal. Rolled oats, which sprinkle badly and swell almost instantly, will not behave the same way and want stirring in all at once rather than raining in by hand.
- A working ratioFor medium oatmeal, roughly 1 part meal to 5 parts water by volume gives a middling porridge; 1 to 6 or 7 gives the thin version some households preferred. Pinhead oatmeal drinks more liquid and wants nearer 1 to 8, with a longer cook.
- The hinge: sprinkle and beat togetherLumps form the moment a handful of meal hits boiling water undisturbed. The two-handed instruction is the whole technique — a slow rain of meal with continuous beating. A whisk does the fork's job more efficiently.
- Twenty minutes is a floor, not a ceilingMedium oatmeal needs the full twenty minutes at a bare simmer to lose its raw, chalky edge; coarse or pinhead meal is better at thirty to forty. The pan is drawn back to bring the heat down to a gentle simmer — a heat diffuser or the lowest gas setting reproduces this.
- TreacleBlack treacle is close to blackstrap molasses; golden syrup is the milder alternative. Either is stirred into the plate, not the pot.
- SaltThe pinch goes in at the start here. Scots practice often held salt back until the meal had swelled, on the belief that early salting toughens the grain; the difference is slight but worth trying both ways.
- Cost and yieldA penny a plateful is a period price, not a recipe measure. As a guide, 40 g of medium oatmeal makes one generous bowl, with the water taken from the ratio above.
The insistence on sprinkling with the left hand while beating with the right is a common description of the technique in nineteenth-century books; in Scotland the beating was traditionally done with a spurtle, a plain wooden rod, and the porridge was eaten from a bowl with a separate cup of cold milk into which each spoonful was dipped. The list of accompaniments — treacle, cream, milk, sugar, butter — spans the class range of the period, treacle being the cheap sweetener and cream the luxury.