Oatmeal Mush
1/4 pound Scotch Oatmeal 1 quart boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Put the oatmeal and salt in a double boiler, pour on the boiling water, and cook for ten minutes, stirring all the time. Then cover and cook gently for four hours. Stir from time to time. Turn into a hot dish and serve with sugar and cream Apples cooked in any way may be served with oatmeal. They should be served with the mush, and sugar and cream poured over the whole.
A straightforward steel-cut porridge whose only difficulty is its timetable, which reflects a coal range that was hot all day anyway.
- Scotch oatmealThis means pinhead or steel-cut oats, the whole groat chopped into two or three pieces, not the rolled flakes sold as old-fashioned oats. Rolled oats substituted here will collapse to paste long before four hours are up.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of steel-cut oats is roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup; a quart of water is 4 cups. That is something like a 5:1 or 6:1 ratio by volume, looser than most modern porridge, which suits the long cook.
- The double boilerThis is the hinge of the recipe. Steel-cut oats scorch readily over direct heat, and the upper pan never exceeds boiling point, which is what makes a largely unwatched four hours possible; the recipe still asks for occasional stirring. Keep water in the lower pan or the whole thing dries out and catches.
- The four hoursModern practice cooks steel-cut oats 25 to 35 minutes over direct low heat with regular stirring. The long cook here produces a smoother, almost creamy mush rather than the distinctly chewy grain a short cook gives; both are legitimate, but the four hours is a texture choice, not a necessity.
- Overnight versionThe same result can be had from a slow cooker on low, or a covered pot in a 250F oven, without a double boiler.
- SaltA teaspoon to a quart is about right and should go in at the start; salt added to finished porridge sits on the surface and tastes harsh.
- YieldAbout four breakfast servings. It thickens considerably as it cools and can be poured into a loaf pan, chilled, sliced and fried in butter, a common way of using leftover mush.
Oatmeal was the backbone of Scottish and northern English eating long before it became an American breakfast staple, and "Scotch oatmeal" on a nineteenth-century grocer's shelf generally meant the coarse pinhead cut rather than any particular origin. Oats carried a reputation, often traced to Scottish example, as a food that built strength cheaply. The four-hour cooking time is a fair record of the kitchen it was likely written for, where a range burned continuously and a double boiler set at the back cost little to run. The recipe adds that apples cooked in any way may be served with it.