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Porridge, Whole Meal
Boil a quart of water, and gradually stir in about half a pound of whole meal. Let it boil for about twenty minutes, add salt to taste, and serve with cold milk as an accompaniment.
A wheat-meal porridge rather than an oat one, and the ratio is the whole recipe: four parts water to one part meal by weight. Everything else is technique.
- "Whole meal" is wheatIn nineteenth-century usage this generally means coarsely ground wholewheat meal — the same meal used for wholemeal bread — rather than oatmeal or oat flakes. A coarse or medium stoneground wholemeal, or cracked wheat meal, is likely to give the texture intended; modern fine wholemeal flour will tend to thicken into paste rather than porridge.
- The quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, or about 4.8 US cups. Half a pound (8 oz) of meal to a quart of water is roughly 5:1 by weight, which is right for a pourable porridge.
- Rain it inThe hinge is the word "gradually." Wheat meal lumps far more readily than rolled oats, so let it fall in a thin stream through the fingers into water at a bare boil while whisking continuously. Dumping it in produces sealed dry pellets that twenty minutes of cooking will not fix.
- Twenty minutes, and stirringWholemeal settles and scorches. Keep the heat at a slow simmer and stir often, or cook it in a double boiler if the pan is thin. It will thicken noticeably in the last five minutes.
- Salt at the end is unusualSalt at the end -- The recipe salts after boiling, simply to taste. Adding half a teaspoon at the start instead gives better-seasoned porridge and no practical penalty.
- Cold milk as an accompanimentServed alongside in a separate bowl or jug rather than poured over, so each spoonful of hot porridge is dipped into cold milk. This is the older Scottish manner; it also keeps the porridge from cooling into sludge.
- YieldAbout 4 modest breakfast servings, or 2 generous ones. It stiffens considerably as it cools and can be thinned with a little boiling water on reheating.
Porridge made from wheat meal rather than oats belongs to a tradition of cereal gruels valued as much for digestibility as for flavour. Wholemeal — in effect flour with the bran and germ left in — was pressed hard by nineteenth-century dietary reformers, who argued that white flour stripped bread of its nourishment; the campaign is generally traced back to Sylvester Graham in America in the 1830s and was taken up by British physicians and food writers through the second half of the century. A recipe like this one, with no sugar, no butter and nothing but salt and cold milk, reflects that thinking rather than any regional tradition: it is a deliberately austere breakfast dish. The instruction to serve the milk separately, though, is straightforwardly traditional, and is still how porridge is eaten in parts of Scotland.