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Scotch Oatmeal Porridge
Oatmeal porridge is made of oatmeal, water, and salt only; no sweet milk, butter-milk, nor butter being used in the preparation of the food, although all of these articles may be used as relishes with it. It is best made from meal of medium coarseness. The water must be boiling when the meal is stirred in, and it must be stirred in carefully and gradually, and not thrown in all at once, and the stirring must be continued during the time of boiling, which should not be less than fifteen minutes, and a longer period is much better. If longer boiled, the grain of the meal gets softer, and, of course, the porridge gets thicker. Porridge is more palatable when a plate or other flat dish is used for it than when it is put into a bowl or basin. When a plate is used the moisture evaporates more quickly and equably than it does from a bowl, and the porridge can be eaten sooner after cooking, and the sooner it is eaten the pleasanter it tastes.
The instructions here are about technique rather than quantity — no proportions are given at all, which is typical of a dish assumed to be in every reader's hands already. A few notes to bridge the gap.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. The ratio usually quoted in Scottish practice is one part medium oatmeal to four or five parts water by volume, with about a teaspoon of salt per litre; start at 1:4 and thin with more boiling water if it stiffens past what you want.
- "Meal of medium coarseness"This is medium-ground oatmeal, sold as medium oatmeal — coarser than fine oatmeal but finer than pinhead — not rolled or instant oats, which are steamed and flattened and will not behave the same way. Steel-cut (pinhead) oats are the nearest common substitute, though coarser and slower.
- Why the meal goes in graduallyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Oatmeal dumped into boiling water gelatinises on the outside of each clump and traps dry meal inside. Rain it in from one hand in a thin stream while stirring steadily with the other.
- The stirring toolA spurtle — a plain wooden rod — is traditional and genuinely better than a spoon, because it moves through thickening porridge without dragging and packing it. A wooden spoon handle works.
- Boiling timeFifteen minutes is the floor and the text is right that longer is better; 25 to 30 minutes over low heat with regular stirring gives a smoother, thicker result. Use a heavy pan and keep the heat low once it thickens, as it scorches readily.
- SaltThe recipe does not say when to add it. Practice varies: some add it with the water, others part-way through cooking, on the traditional view that early salt toughens the grain. Either way it is added during cooking rather than at table, so it seasons the grain.
- Serving on a plateThe reasoning holds: a shallow dish cools and dries the surface evenly, so it can be eaten at once. The traditional accompaniment is a separate bowl of cold milk or buttermilk, each spoonful of hot porridge dipped into it — which is what the opening sentence means by "relishes".
- YieldOne cup of medium oatmeal to four cups of water gives roughly three to four servings.
Oatmeal was the staple grain of Scotland for centuries because oats tolerate cool, wet summers and poor soil where wheat fails, and the insistence here that porridge contains oatmeal, water and salt only reflects a real and still-live argument about the dish: sugar, cream and butter belong beside it, not in it. The custom of eating hot porridge with a separate bowl of cold milk is often explained as a way of cooling each spoonful without diluting the pot, and the plate rather than the bowl is a detail that recurs in nineteenth-century Scottish writing on the subject. Purpose-made oatmeal stirrers, later widely called spurtles, are of long standing in Scottish kitchens, though the word itself was applied to several kinds of kitchen stick before it settled on the porridge rod.