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Oatmeal with Cheese
2 cups of oatmeal 1 cup of grated cheese 1 tablespoon of butter 1 scant teaspoon of salt Cook the oatmeal as usual. Shortly before serving, stir in the butter, and add the cheese, and stir until the cheese is melted, and thoroughly blended with the cereal.
The cheese should be mild in flavor and soft in texture. The proportion of cheese used may be increased if a more pronounced cheese flavor is desired.
A savory oatmeal that predates the current fashion for it by a century. The whole recipe hinges on how the cheese goes in.
- Add the cheese off the heatPull the pan from the burner before stirring in the grated cheese. Held over direct heat it breaks and turns grainy or stringy; residual heat in a thick porridge is more than enough to melt it smoothly.
- "2 cups of oatmeal" is dry measure"2 cups of oatmeal" is probably dry measure -- "cook the oatmeal as usual" implies you start with uncooked oats. Two cups of rolled oats cooked in about 4 cups of water with the salt gives roughly 4 cups cooked and serves four to six; steel-cut takes closer to three or four times its volume in water and swells further.
- What "oatmeal" meantIn American books of this period the word may mean either rolled oats or the coarser cut Scotch or Irish meal, and the recipe does not say which. Steel-cut gives the firmer texture this dish wants and takes 25 to 30 minutes; rolled oats take 5 to 10.
- "Mild in flavor and soft in texture"Most likely a young, mild factory cheese. Mild cheddar, Monterey Jack, young Gouda or a soft Muenster all behave the same way. Avoid aged, dry cheeses, which separate into oil and curds.
- Salt the cooking waterThe scant teaspoon belongs in the water at the start, not stirred in at the end. Taste again after the cheese goes in, since the cheese carries its own salt.
- Increasing the cheeseThe recipe invites more, but doubling it or beyond will start to make the mixture slack and greasy. If you want it richer rather than cheesier, raise the butter instead.
- ServingIntended hot; the recipe says only "shortly before serving." Leftovers set firm enough to be cut into squares and pan-fried, the way cold cooked cereal mush was often used up in this period.
Books titled along the lines of Meatless Cookery proliferated in the United States in the 1910s, when Lenten cooking, vegetarian reform movements and then wartime food conservation campaigns all pushed households toward dishes that supplied protein without butcher's meat. Cheese was the workhorse of that project: cheap, shelf-stable, and understood at the time as a direct substitute for meat, which is why a dish that is essentially cheese sauce and porridge in one pot could earn a place in such a book. Oats had a longer standing as a savory grain than modern breakfast habits suggest, having been eaten with salt, butter and dairy in Scotland and Ireland for centuries before American manufacturers taught the country to expect them sweetened. The instruction to "cook the oatmeal as usual" is a reminder of how domestic these books assumed their readers were: a boiled cereal needed no explaining, but the trick of blending cheese into it did.