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Rolled Oats Mush
1 cup rolled oats 2 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt Add the oats and salt to the boiling water stirring constantly. Boil five minutes, then steam in a double boiler two hours.
A plain porridge from an era when oats came less processed than they do now. The two-hour steaming is the one instruction a modern cook should ignore.
- The two hoursRolled oats sold today are thinner-flaked than the coarse rolled oats of the early twentieth century, and they cook through in 5 to 10 minutes of simmering. Two hours over a double boiler gives glue. If you want the long-cooked texture the recipe is after, use steel-cut oats instead, which do reward 30 to 40 minutes.
- Ratio1 cup oats to 2 cups water is about the standard modern ratio, but cooked this long it sets firm enough to slice cold. For a looser breakfast porridge use 2 1/2 to 3 cups liquid, or finish with milk at the table.
- Double boilerThe point of the double boiler was to hold heat for hours without scorching on a coal range. On a modern hob, a heavy saucepan on the lowest setting with occasional stirring does everything you need.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon to a cup of dry oats is a reasonable amount, and here it goes into the boiling water along with the oats rather than at the end. Salt added at the end tastes like it was added at the end.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups cooked, serving two generously or three modestly.
- The leftoversCold mush of this stiffness was often pressed into a loaf pan, chilled overnight, sliced and fried in fat for the next morning. The recipe does not say that was the aim, but it still works.
Rolled oats were an industrial product before they were a breakfast staple: the flaking mill, which steams and presses the whole groat, spread through American milling in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and turned oats from a long-boiling porridge grain into something a household could cook in a morning. Cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s still gave the long steaming times inherited from the older, coarser meal. If the book is indeed a meatless one, its appearance there would be a matter of protein arithmetic as much as breakfast habit: vegetarian and wartime-economy writers of the period leaned hard on cereals, legumes and nuts to fill the place meat had held on the plate.