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Steamed or Rolled Oats
Soak over night, pour on boiling water in the morning, allowing one cup of meal to one quart of water and one teaspoon of salt. Cook one hour or two.
A double-boiler breakfast porridge from the era when oats came whole or coarsely cut and needed long, gentle cooking. The instruction that matters most is the ratio: one cup of oats to one quart of water, which is 1:4 and much looser than most modern packet directions.
- The long cooking is for a different oatAn hour or two suits steel-cut or coarse Scotch oatmeal; a double boiler was one common way of keeping the bottom from scorching, though this recipe does not specify one. Modern rolled oats are pre-steamed and collapse to paste well before then; they need about 5 minutes, quick oats 1 to 2, steel-cut 25 to 40.
- "Meal" hereThe heading offers a choice between steamed and rolled oats; "steamed" here probably means the coarser cut oat rather than the flaked kind, though the book does not define it. The body then says "meal" for either, so treat it as whatever oat you are using, not as oat flour.
- SoakingAn overnight soak in cold water softens coarse oats and shortens the morning cooking. It is still worth doing for steel-cut; it does nothing useful for rolled oats beyond a slightly creamier texture.
- SaltA full teaspoon to a quart is assertive but correct for savoury-leaning porridge in this tradition. Reduce to half if you intend to add sugar, syrup or fruit.
- VesselIf you want the original texture without watching the pot, a double boiler works well, or a heavy pan on the lowest burner setting with a diffuser.
- YieldOne cup of oats to a quart of water gives roughly four modest breakfast servings; the porridge thickens considerably as it stands and stiffens outright once chilled.
Oatmeal porridge reached American breakfast tables through two channels: Scottish and northern English domestic practice, where oats had long been the everyday grain, and the late nineteenth-century milling industry, which learned to steam and roll oats so they cooked in minutes and could be sold in branded packages. A cereals chapter like this one sits on the seam between the two, giving instructions for slow overnight-soaked coarse oatmeal at a moment when the rolled kind was already displacing it. A double boiler was one common way of managing a long morning cook on a coal or wood range without scorching, though this recipe does not specify a vessel.