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Scotch Oatmeal Brose
Brose is a Scotch food made from oatmeal, and is perhaps the food most quickly cooked of any used by civilised men. The process is as follows. Put a handful of oatmeal into a good-sized basin, add a large pinch of salt, pour about a pint of boiling water over it, stir with the handle of a spoon, when the meal will form little lumps. Do not break the lumps, but pour in half a pint of either sweet milk or butter-milk, and the cooking will be complete. Eat immediately after cooking. Some add a piece of butter, but the brose is more wholesome without it; indeed, all preparations of oatmeal are more wholesome without the addition of any fatty substance, the oatmeal having quite enough of the heat-producing element in itself. This is a common breakfast dish among Scotch ploughmen in some districts. It cannot be recommended to sedentary persons.
Brose is scalded oatmeal rather than boiled porridge, and almost everything about it depends on the meal being coarse and the water being at a full rolling boil.
- The right oatmealThis needs stone-ground pinhead or medium oatmeal, not rolled or instant oats. Rolled oats have been steamed and flattened, so they slump into paste instead of forming the knots the recipe depends on.
- A handfulThe recipe gives no measure; an ounce or two of meal to the pint of water and half-pint of milk is a reasonable reading. That is one bowlful; scale by the bowl rather than the pot.
- The hinge: do not stir it smoothThe water should be boiling when it hits the meal, and the meal is agitated only enough to form lumps — the 'knots' that give brose its character. The recipe is explicit that these are not to be broken; stir on and the meal disperses into thin porridge.
- Sweet milk"Sweet milk" means fresh, unsoured milk, as against buttermilk. The recipe offers either; buttermilk gives the sharper version, and modern cultured buttermilk works as a stand-in.
- Why the salt goes in firstWhy the salt goes in with the meal -- The salt is put in the basin with the meal before the boiling water is poured over, so it dissolves and seasons the whole bowl rather than sitting on top of the finished knots.
- Texture, and eating it at onceThe outside of each knot is cooked and the centre stays chewy — that is the dish, not a fault. Left to stand it absorbs the liquid and stiffens into a solid mass, hence "eat immediately."
- The claim about butterThe assertion that oatmeal is more wholesome without fat is Victorian dietetics, not nutrition. A knob of butter or a spoonful of cream changes nothing but the richness.
Brose belongs to the oat-based diet of lowland and northeast Scotland, where oats grew reliably in cool, wet ground that would not ripen wheat. It differs from porridge chiefly in method: porridge is simmered and stirred for a quarter of an hour or more, while brose is simply scalded in the bowl, which is why Cassell's presents it as the most quickly cooked food it knows. The related Atholl brose — oatmeal, honey and whisky — shares the name, which is usually traced to the same root as "brewis," a broth or liquid-soaked dish. The closing remark that it "cannot be recommended to sedentary persons" reflects the period's habit of ranking foods by how much labour the eater performed: a ploughman's breakfast was treated as fuel for a day in the field, and lighter fare was urged on those at a desk.