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Oatmeal Porridge
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 2 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, syrup or butter. 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 when the water boils. Sufficient for two persons.
A plain British-style porridge from the days when "oatmeal" meant a gritty ground grain rather than a flake. The proportions and the timing both need translating.
- What "oatmeal" means hereThis is medium or pinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, not rolled oats. Rolled oats sprinkled into fast-boiling water will turn to paste in under five minutes and do not need the fork treatment at all.
- The ratio is thinTwo ounces of meal to a pint and a half of liquid is roughly 1/3 cup of oatmeal to somewhere between 3 and 3 3/4 cups of liquid, depending on whether the pints are US or imperial: a pourable gruel by current taste. For a porridge that holds a spoon, use about 1 cup of steel-cut oats to 3 1/2 cups liquid.
- Boiling hard is the hingeThe instruction to let the water boil fast before the meal goes in is correct and worth obeying. Meal dropped into water below a rolling boil sinks in clumps that a fork cannot break up; sprinkled thinly into turbulent water, each grain is sealed and separate.
- Fifteen minutes is shortA quarter hour softens medium oatmeal but leaves pinhead grains chalky at the center. Give steel-cut oats 25 to 30 minutes over low heat, stirring now and then, and add a splash of water if it tightens too soon.
- Heat managementOnce the meal is in and the lumps are out, drop to a bare simmer. Left at a full boil it will spit scalding starch and catch on the pan bottom.
- SaltA pinch for this quantity is modest; about 1/2 teaspoon suits the volume. The recipe adds it at the start, which seasons the whole pot rather than the surface.
- ServingTwo servings as written, and thin ones. Serving hot porridge with a separate bowl of cold milk, each spoonful dipped into it, is a traditional Scottish practice, though this recipe offers milk and sugar, syrup or butter.
The technique described here — meal sprinkled with the left hand into fast-boiling salted water while the right hand stirs — is the method long associated with Scottish porridge-making, and similar descriptions appear in nineteenth-century cookery books. A dedicated wooden stirring stick, the spurtle or theevil, was the usual tool north of the border; this book's substitution of a fork may point to a general English readership. The recommendation of porridge as "nourishing and wholesome" for children fits a period in which oats were prized as cheap, filling and easily digested, and when oatmeal was commonly bought loose rather than as packaged rolled oats.