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Oatmeal Pudding
Put a tea-cupful of coarse oatmeal to soak in a pint of boiling milk until the mixture is quite cold. Keep it covered, add a pinch of salt, a beaten egg, and a table-spoonful or more of sugar or honey. Bake in a slow oven for an hour and a half. Grate a little nutmeg over the top, and serve. Another way is to cook the oatmeal and milk, after soaking, in a double pan for a couple of hours, adding the egg ten minutes before its removal. Then serve with stewed fruit, jam, etc.
A plain baked oatmeal custard of the sort that filled out Victorian nursery and invalid cookery. The soaking is not optional — it does most of the work of softening the grain.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" in Victorian usage is generally taken as somewhere around 275-325F. At that sort of heat the egg sets gently over the full hour and a half; hotter and the custard curdles and weeps.
- Coarse oatmealThis means pinhead or steel-cut oats, not rolled oats and not instant. Rolled oats soaked in boiling milk collapse into porridge and the pudding loses all texture.
- MeasuresA Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at a quarter pint, about 5 imperial fl oz (roughly 6 US fl oz, or 3/4 US cup) of oats to a pint (20 imperial fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups) of milk. If you use a US pint the pudding will be noticeably stiffer.
- Soak until coldThe instruction to let it stand until "quite cold" matters twice over: the oats keep absorbing milk as the temperature drops, and warm milk would scramble the egg when you stir it in.
- Sugar and honeyThe recipe allows "a table-spoonful or more", and one tablespoon is restrained by modern taste. Two to three tablespoons brings it closer to what is now expected of a dessert.
- The double-pan versionThat is a double boiler or bain-marie, giving a looser, spoonable pudding rather than a baked one. Adding the egg only ten minutes before the end keeps it from setting into threads over two hours of heat.
- YieldProbably about four small servings. A dish of roughly a quart will hold it shallow enough to set evenly.
Oatmeal puddings belong to the long British tradition of stretching a cheap grain with milk and an egg, and they turn up repeatedly in nineteenth-century books under both nursery and invalid cookery — digestible, warm, inexpensive, and requiring no attention while it baked. Coarse oatmeal was the everyday grain of Scotland and the north of England well into the Victorian period, where oats grew where wheat would not, though the recipe reads as an example of a milk-and-egg pudding rather than as a regional dish. The second method, cooking in a double pan, reflects a kitchen where a covered pot on the hob was more reliable than an oven whose temperature nobody could measure. The suggestion to serve it with stewed fruit or jam may reflect the older habit of sweetening at the table rather than in the mixing bowl.