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Rolled Oats
1½ cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Mix all ingredients, and cook in double boiler thirty minutes to one hour.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the oats themselves have dropped out of the line, leaving only the water and salt. Everything else about the method is intact, and it tells you a good deal about the oats of the period.
- The missing quantityWith 1½ cups boiling water and 1 teaspoon salt, the omitted line was probably in the region of ¾ cup rolled oats, a 2:1 water-to-oats ratio; period recipes vary widely, some calling for three or four times as much water as oats. The recipe as printed cannot be followed literally; treat any ratio as the reconstruction it is.
- Double boiler, and whyThe upper pan never touches the flame, so the porridge cannot scorch or catch and needs no watching. Set the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and keep the level topped up over a long cook.
- Thirty minutes to one hourThat range belongs to the thick-cut, lightly steamed oats sold in 1907. Modern quick and old-fashioned rolled oats are pressed thinner and pre-steamed harder; they are done in 5 to 15 minutes on direct heat and will turn to paste over an hour. Steel-cut oats are the closest match to the long timing.
- Boiling water firstThe water is specified as already boiling. Oatmeal begun in cold water is often said to come out gluier, though the book gives no reason for its wording.
- Salt levelA teaspoon in 1½ cups of water is assertive by current habit but correct for savoury-leaning breakfast porridge. Half that suits most modern palates, particularly if the bowl will get sugar or fruit.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantity, two generous servings or three small ones. It thickens further as it stands and stiffens once chilled.
- Why it sits under VegetablesSome books of this period filed cereals and grains among the vegetables rather than giving them a chapter of their own. Nothing about the method is unusual for oatmeal.
Rolled oats were an industrial product still relatively new when this book appeared: whole oat groats steamed and pressed flat between rollers, a process commercialised in the United States in the later nineteenth century and heavily promoted by the big milling firms. Before that, oatmeal at breakfast meant cut or ground meal that wanted long cooking and constant stirring, and the double boiler was the standard household answer to anything that had to cook for an hour without scorching, and it is often said that such porridge was set over the range overnight or through the morning's other work. The instruction to allow anything up to a full hour, which looks excessive against a modern canister of oats, is a fair measure of how much less processed those early flakes were. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, issued this book chiefly to sell cocoa, but as with many manufacturer cookbooks of the day it padded out the volume with a full range of plain household cookery, which is how a bare porridge formula ends up between the potatoes and the parsnips.