Home › Sunday Morning Breakfasts › Oatmeal-and-Pecan Mush
Oatmeal-and-Pecan Mush
2 cups oatmeal 4 cups water 1 cup seeded raisins 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup chopped pecans Steam oatmeal and water for 4 hours in covered double boiler. Add salt, raisins and cinnamon. Steam 10 minutes longer and add pecans. Turn into buttered pan and let stand 24 hours in refrigerator. Then slice and brown in greased pan, on top of stove or in oven. Serve with the omelet.
A make-ahead breakfast loaf: porridge cooked stiff, chilled solid overnight, then sliced and fried. The four-hour steam is not a misprint, but it is optional with modern oats.
- Which oatmealA four-hour double-boiler steam suits steel-cut (pinhead) oats, though older books also cooked rolled oats for hours this way, and the recipe does not say which is meant. Steel-cut will hold the long cooking and set into a firm sliceable block; with rolled oats, about half an hour of gentle cooking should be enough and the loaf will still set.
- The double boilerThe point of the double boiler is that oatmeal at this thickness scorches on direct heat. If you cook it in a heavy saucepan instead, keep the flame very low and stir often. A slow cooker on low overnight does the same job unattended.
- Water ratioTwo parts water to one part oats is deliberately stingy — this is a mush meant to set, not a bowl of porridge. Expect a stiff, spoon-standing mass by the end. Top up with a little boiling water only if it threatens to catch before the grain is tender.
- The chill is the hingeThe 24 hours in the refrigerator is what makes the loaf sliceable. Underchilled mush crumbles in the pan. Pack it into a loaf tin, press the surface flat, and cover once cold so it does not form a skin.
- Slicing and browningCut slices about half an inch thick and dry the cut faces briefly on a towel before they hit the fat. Fry in butter or oil over medium heat, six to eight minutes a side, and leave them alone until a crust forms — moving them early is what tears them. The recipe gives no oven setting; a hot oven on a well-greased sheet, turning once, will do the same job.
- Raisins and nutsPecans go in at the very end so they keep some bite; stirred in earlier they soften into the mush. Chop them coarsely rather than fine, or they disappear entirely.
- YieldThe quantity fills roughly a standard loaf pan; the recipe itself gives no yield or serving count.
- ServingThe instruction to "serve with the omelet" points to a companion dish in an accompanying menu. On its own the mush wants maple syrup, honey or cream to offset the salt.
Fried mush is one of the oldest American breakfast economies: a grain porridge cooked thick, set overnight, sliced and crisped in fat the next morning. The cornmeal version is the more familiar one — it appears in nineteenth-century household books across the Northeast and Midwest, and the same principle underlies Pennsylvania scrapple and Italian fried polenta. Substituting oatmeal for cornmeal, and dressing it with raisins, cinnamon and pecans, is a small refashioning of that idea. The long double-boiler steam suits a range kept warm for hours anyway, where a covered pot at the back could be left to itself.