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PORRIDGE, OATMEAL (another way)
Put a pint and a half of water, or milk and water, into a saucepan, and add a pinch of salt. When the liquid fully boils, as it is rising in the pan, sprinkle gradually two ounces of oatmeal into it with the left hand, and at the same time stir briskly with a fork held in the right hand. Keep stirring until the lumps are beaten out. Boil the mixture for a quarter of an hour, pour it on a plate, and eat it with milk and sugar or treacle. A larger or a smaller quantity of oatmeal may be used, according to taste. Porridge will be found to make a very nourishing and wholesome breakfast for children. The secret of making it properly is to let the water boil fast before putting in the oatmeal. Time, a quarter of an hour from the moment the water boils. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for one person.
PORRIDGE, OATMEAL (another way). (See OATMEAL PORRIDGE.)
A thin Victorian breakfast porridge, closer to gruel than to the stiff bowl most people expect. The technique is sound, but the ratio and the oat itself need translating.
- The oatmeal is not rolled oatsIn Victorian usage "oatmeal" means dry-milled oat groats — pinhead (steel-cut) or medium ground meal. Rolled oats, which are steamed and pressed, cook in about five minutes and will turn to paste in fifteen.
- The proportionsA pint and a half in a British book is 30 fl oz (about 850 ml), against 2 oz of meal — roughly a third of a cup. That gives a pourable, drinkable porridge. For a modern spoonable bowl use about 1 cup of medium oatmeal or steel-cut oats to that same liquid, which the recipe explicitly permits.
- The hinge: a fast rolling boilThe original says so outright, and it is the whole trick. Meal sprinkled into water that is merely simmering sinks and clumps; water at a hard boil keeps each grain separate long enough for the starch to set. Sprinkle in a thin stream with one hand while stirring hard with the other.
- TimingA quarter of an hour suits medium oatmeal. Pinhead or steel-cut oats want 20–30 minutes at a bare simmer with occasional stirring, and benefit from the heat being dropped once the meal is in.
- Milk and waterCooking in milk or milk and water slows the starch and scorches easily; if you use it, keep the heat low after the boil and stir more often, or add the milk in the last few minutes.
- TreacleBlack treacle is the closest thing to blackstrap molasses; golden syrup is the milder option. Either goes on at the table, not in the pan.
- SaltThe pinch is not optional. Unsalted porridge tastes flat and chalky, and about a quarter teaspoon for this quantity is closer to what suits the dish.
- Yield and costOne serving, as stated. The threepence is a period price and no guide to anything now beyond how cheap oats were.
Oatmeal porridge was regarded less as a dish than as a basic domestic competence — cheap, filling, and a standard nursery and working breakfast across Britain, particularly Scotland and the north of England, where oats grew where wheat would not. The word porridge is generally taken to be an alteration of pottage, the general medieval term for anything boiled in a pot, narrowing to grain-and-water in later centuries. The insistence on sprinkling meal into fast-boiling salted water with one hand while stirring with the other is the traditional method, traditionally done with a wooden spurtle rather than the fork specified here; the sweetening with sugar or treacle marks this as an English-leaning version, since Scottish custom held that porridge took salt and cold milk and nothing else. The trailing cross-reference is an artefact of the dictionary format, the same dish being indexed under more than one heading with readers pointed between the entries.