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Scotch Bran Brose
1 cup rolled oats 1 cup sterilized bran 2 1/2 cups water 1 teaspoon salt Heat the water to boiling in a double boiler. Add the salt, bran and the rolled oats and boil ten minutes.
A plain two-grain breakfast cereal from the era when bran was sold as a health food and a flour-stretcher. The method needs a little translation before it behaves.
- The double boiler is the hingeWater in the upper pan of a double boiler will not truly boil once the grain is in it; it holds at just under boiling. The instruction to "boil ten minutes" means ten minutes over steam, which for this quantity of grain is a gentle set-and-swell rather than a rolling cook. If you use a plain saucepan instead, keep the heat low and stir, or the bran will scorch on the bottom.
- Sterilized branThis was wheat bran sold heat-treated, a common way of stabilising and cleaning bran for the table rather than the feed trough. Plain miller's or wheat bran from the bulk aisle is the closest modern stand-in; toasting it dry in a skillet for a few minutes improves the flavour. Do not substitute bran cereal flakes or oat bran, which behave differently.
- Rolled oats have changedCommercial rolled oats of this period were thicker-cut and needed real cooking time. Modern old-fashioned rolled oats will be soft in five minutes and quick oats in two, so the full ten minutes gives a much softer, thicker result than the writer had in mind. Steel-cut oats would need far longer than ten minutes and are not a drop-in swap.
- Liquid ratioTwo and a half cups of water to two cups of dry grain is stiff by modern taste, and the bran absorbs heavily. Expect something closer to a spoonable paste than a pourable porridge; another half cup to a cup of water or milk loosens it without harm.
- SaltA full teaspoon for two cups of dry cereal is on the salty side of current practice, though traditional Scottish oat dishes were seasoned firmly. Half a teaspoon suits most palates.
- Yield and servingRoughly four servings. The book offers no accompaniment, but brose and its relatives were eaten with cold milk or buttermilk poured round the edge, or with cream, treacle, molasses or brown sugar.
Brose is a Scots word, generally traced to the same root as the older English brewis, meaning a broth or a dish of bread or meal soaked in hot liquid. Traditional brose is distinguished from porridge precisely by not being cooked: boiling water or stock is poured over dry oatmeal in a bowl, stirred once, salted, and eaten while the meal is still nutty and only half-swollen. What appears here is therefore brose in name and porridge in method, with the addition of bran, which was a fashionable ingredient of American cookery writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, promoted both for regularity and as a way to make a small quantity of grain go further.