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Sowens
Sowens is one of the national dishes of Scotland, made from the husk of the oat (called in Scotland seeds). These seeds contain a good deal of farinaceous matter after they are separated from the oatmeal, and this matter is converted into a very nourishing and palatable article of food. In some of the northern towns of Scotland thin sowens are drunk on New Year's Day morning, while "buttered sowens wi' fragrant lunt" is in rural districts the supper for Hallow Eve. This dish is known in England, Wales, and Ireland as "flummery." It is very good eaten cold, and will turn out in a shape, making a kind of oatmeal jelly. To prepare it, soak any quantity of oatmeal seeds in a tub or large jar, and pour upon them twice their bulk in lukewarm water. Leave for three or four days in a warm place till sour. Pass the whole through a sieve, and squeeze the seeds, moistening them with a little of the liquor, to get all the goodness out of them. Let the liquor thus obtained stand till the starchy matter it contains sinks to the bottom; then pour it off, and add fresh cold water. When the sowens are wanted, pour off the water, and mix with the starchy sediment as much water as will thin it; put a little salt into it, and boil it, stirring briskly all the time till it thickens. Pour it into a deep bowl, and serve with wine, beer, or milk. Sowens thus made will keep good for a week or more in winter. If a little that has turned sour be mixed with that which is to be freshly made, it will facilitate the preparation. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to thicken the sowens.
This is a wild fermentation rather than a cooked dish in the ordinary sense: almost all the work is done by the souring, and the fifteen minutes on the stove is only the finish. Two things decide whether it succeeds — the raw material and the temperature at which it sours.
- "Seeds" means oat husksThe Scots "sids" or "seeds" are the inner husks left after oats were shelled and ground in a mill, still carrying a film of meal. Modern commercial oat milling rarely offers them for sale, so the authentic ingredient is hard to come by outside a traditional mill. Coarse pinhead or steel-cut oatmeal will sour and yield starch in the same way, though the flavour is likely to be milder.
- "A warm place" is 65-75F"A warm place" -- read as roughly 65-75F: warm enough for lactic bacteria to outrun anything else, not hot. A kitchen counter is about right; a warmer spot such as an airing cupboard will run faster and may be ready sooner than the three or four days given. In a cold room the souring slows and the mixture is more likely to go musty than sour.
- What it should smell likeCleanly sharp and yeasty, like sourdough starter or buttermilk. Fuzzy or coloured mould on the surface, a pink or orange tinge, or a putrid rather than acid smell means the batch has gone wrong and should be thrown out. Keep the tub loosely covered and use a non-reactive vessel — glass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic, not bare metal.
- The decanting is a starch washLetting the liquor settle and pouring off the sour water, then replacing it with fresh, is the same operation as washing wheat starch. Give it several hours to settle fully; the sediment is fine and slow. Repeating the rinse once or twice more gives a milder, sweeter sowens, which is closer to modern taste.
- The backslopMixing in a little of the previous sour batch is deliberate inoculation, exactly as with sourdough. It shortens the fermentation by a day or so and makes the result more predictable than relying on whatever is on the husks.
- Stirring is not optionalRaw starch dropped into a pan will lump and catch the moment it gelatinises. Stir continuously from the start over moderate heat; the fifteen to twenty minutes given is right, and the mixture should go from milky to thick and translucent, like a loose blancmange.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none, which is honest — the starch yield depends entirely on how much meal clings to the husks. As a working scale, follow the book's proportion: a quart of steel-cut oats soaked in two quarts of water. Thin the sediment more for drinking, less for turning out of a mould.
- Serving hot and coldHot, it is a porridge, served as the book directs with wine, beer, or milk. Cold, poured into a wetted bowl or mould and left several hours, it sets to the oatmeal jelly the book equates with flummery. Keep it refrigerated and use within a few days rather than the week the original allows for an unheated winter larder.
Sowens comes from the Gaelic sùghan, from sùgh, juice or sap — the dish is literally the goodness soaked out of what the mill would otherwise have swept away, which is why it belonged to crofting households rather than grand kitchens. The English, Welsh and Irish equivalent named here, flummery, is generally traced to the Welsh llymru, and the same principle of souring a grain's husk or bran and boiling the settled starch is said to turn up in other places where oats were a staple. The Hallowe'en phrase Cassell quotes, "buttered sowens wi' fragrant lunt," is from Burns's poem Halloween; lunt is the steam or smoke rising off the bowl. Its appearance in a late-Victorian English dictionary of cookery is telling: by then sowens was less a dish an English reader might cook than an example of how thoroughly older kitchens extracted nourishment from a grain.