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Oatmeal Mush
Put one breakfast cupful of coarse oatmeal into the top part of a double boiler with a teaspoonful of salt and nearly one quart of boiling water, boil over the fire for ten minutes, stirring all the time with a wooden fork. At the end of that time place the upper boiler in the one containing hot water and cook for an hour if preferred soft, but if liked dry, cook for three hours. Just before serving remove the cover from the top boiler, stir the contents once and leave it for a few minutes so that the steam may escape.
A straightforward double-boiler porridge from the Waldorf's breakfast service, written for steel-cut oats rather than the rolled flakes most kitchens now keep.
- "Coarse oatmeal" means steel-cutThis is cut or pinhead oats, not rolled oats and not instant. Rolled oats cooked for three hours turn to paste; if that is what you have, the long steaming stage is pointless and 10 to 20 minutes over direct heat is enough.
- A breakfast cupfulThe breakfast cup of the period was not a standardised measure and may run larger than a modern 8 fl oz cup. Treat it as one cup of oats to a quart of water, a 1:4 ratio by volume, which gives a loose mush at the one-hour stage.
- The double boiler is the pointThe first ten minutes over direct flame set the starch; everything after that is gentle steaming that cannot scorch or catch. Keep water in the lower pan and top it up, since three hours will boil a good deal away.
- Soft versus dryOne hour gives spoonable porridge. Three hours drives off much of the free water and gives something firm enough to slice cold and fry in butter, one common way of using leftover mush.
- The wooden forkA fork rather than a spoon keeps the grains separate instead of mashing them, and wood will not scratch a tinned or enamelled pan. A wooden spoon works, used lightly.
- SaltA full teaspoon to a quart is correct for savoury porridge and should go in with the water, not at the end — oats salted after cooking taste flat.
- The last uncovered minutesLifting the lid and letting the trapped steam off is what keeps the surface from going slick and watery. Do not stir it more than the once specified.
- YieldAbout four servings, with cream, milk or brown sugar at the table.
Oatmeal held a peculiar place on grand American hotel menus around 1900: it was both the plainest thing in the book and a mark of a well-run breakfast, since properly cooked steel-cut oats take hours and cannot be produced to order. In a kitchen like Oscar Tschirky's at the Waldorf one imagines a pot on the range from well before dawn, and the double boiler was standard equipment for exactly this kind of long, unattended, unscorchable cooking. The distinction between coarse-cut and rolled oats mattered more then than now: the process that produced rolled oats was industrialised in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was still the newer product, so a recipe specifying "coarse oatmeal" may well have been ruling it out on purpose. "Mush" is the older American word for any grain boiled to a porridge, most often cornmeal; that a book of this period has to say oatmeal mush tells you which grain the word normally meant.