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Oatmeal Molded with Raisins
Cover three tablespoonfuls of good raisins with rapidly boiling water and let stand just long enough to swell out and soften. Remove the seeds and cut in two. Stir these into two cups of cooked oatmeal while still warm, being careful not to break the grains of oatmeal. Moisten any small cups or jelly-glasses with cold water, half fill with the mixture, and set away in a cold place.
Serve with cream or rich milk.
A thrift dish built on yesterday's porridge, and one that works only if the oatmeal is stiff enough to hold a shape. Everything hinges on the consistency of the cereal you start with.
- The cereal itselfThe recipe's warning about "the grains of oatmeal" suggests a coarse or steel-cut meal cooked thick, which sets firm as it cools; rolled oats were also on sale by this date. Modern quick or instant oats turn to paste and will slump out of the mould. Use steel-cut, cooked stiff enough that a spoon stands briefly in it.
- Seeded raisinsThe instruction to remove seeds dates the recipe: seedless varieties were not yet standard, and muscatels came with pips. Today's raisins need only a brief soak in boiling water to plump, then a rough chop if you want the halved effect.
- "Just long enough to swell"A few minutes off the heat, judged by feel rather than the clock. Longer and the raisins waterlog and bleed colour into the oatmeal.
- Folding, not stirringStirring gently -- The recipe says to stir the raisins in but warns against breaking the grains. Warm oatmeal worked hard goes gluey; move the raisins through with a few turns and stop.
- Moistening the mouldsRinsing cups with cold water and not drying them leaves a film that keeps the cereal from gripping. It is the same trick used for blancmange.
- "A cold place"The refrigerator, three to four hours, until fully set. Cover the moulds; oatmeal skins over and takes on odours quickly.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of cooked oatmeal will half-fill anywhere from four to eight moulds depending on their size, so count on four to eight modest breakfast portions. Turn out onto plates and pour cream around rather than over, so the mould keeps its edges. A little brown sugar or maple syrup is not unfaithful to the period.
Books of this kind multiplied in the decades either side of 1900, when a middle-class household still expected every scrap accounted for and the domestic-science movement gave that expectation a scientific vocabulary. Breakfast cereal was newly industrial and newly abundant, and a pot of oatmeal was cooked in quantity because coarse oats took the better part of an hour; leftovers were inevitable and the literature is full of ways to use them, fried in slices, baked into puddings, or moulded like this one. Moulding cold food into individual shapes was itself a mark of a well-run table, borrowed from the jellies and creams of the dinner service and applied here to the humblest possible material. The result is close to what a Scottish or Irish kitchen would recognise, though those traditions are often said to have set cold porridge in a drawer or tray and cut it in slabs for frying rather than dressing it up in jelly-glasses with cream.