Home › Breakfast And Tea Cakes › Oat-Meal Mush
Oat-Meal Mush
To two quarts boiling water, well salted, add one and a half cups best oat meal (Irish, Scotch, Canadian or Akron are best) ; stir in meal by degrees, and after stirring up a few times to prevent its settling down in a mass at the bottom, leave it to cook three hours without stirring. While stirring in meal put inner kettle directly on stove. (Cook in a custard-kettle with water in outer kettle). To cook for breakfast it may be put on over night, allowing it to boil an hour or two in the evening, but it is better when freshly cooked. Serve with cream and sugar. This is unsurpassed as a breakfastdish, especially for growing children, who need bone and muscleproducing producing food. To be wholesome it must be well cooked, and not , half-cooked mass usually served at boarding-houses. There are a few persons with very delicate digestive powers, who should eat oat -meal only when thoroughly pearled, as the outer husks of the grain irritate the coatings of the stomach. In lieu of a custard-kettle the mush may be made in a pan or small tin bucket, and then placed in a steamer and steamed two hours.
A long-cooked porridge from the era before rolled oats, written for coarse-cut meal that genuinely needed hours of hydration. The ratio and the vessel are the two things to get right.
- Custard-kettle means double boilerA "custard-kettle" is a two-part pan: the inner vessel holds the food, the outer holds simmering water. Any double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of water, does the same job. The recipe has you start the inner kettle directly on the heat to bring things up to temperature, then move it into the water bath for the long unstirred cook.
- What oat meal meant hereIrish, Scotch, Canadian and Akron meal were all coarse-cut or pinhead oats, not the flaked oats that came in with rolled-oat milling from the 1870s onward and gradually displaced them. Use steel-cut oats. Rolled oats in this quantity of water will collapse into thin gruel long before three hours are up.
- The ratio is deliberately looseTwo quarts water to one and a half cups meal is roughly 5:1 by volume, thinner than the 3 or 4:1 on a modern package. It works because the long slow cook drives off a great deal of water. If you shorten the cooking, cut the water accordingly.
- Three hours was not padding, but you need fewerNineteenth-century meal was coarser and less uniformly cut, and cooks distrusted anything underdone. Steel-cut oats in a double boiler will be tender in about an hour, perhaps a little more; a full three hours yields something very soft and slightly sweet.
- Do not stirThe instruction to leave it alone after the first few stirs is the hinge. Stirring cut oats releases starch and turns the mush gluey; the water bath prevents scorching so agitation is unnecessary.
- The overnight methodThe recipe allows boiling it an hour or two in the evening and leaving it to stand overnight, which suited a range that held residual heat. If you want breakfast porridge ready in advance, cook it, refrigerate it, and reheat with a splash of milk rather than leaving a starchy pot at room temperature all night.
- "Pearled" oatsPearling means abrading off the bran layer, the same process that gives pearl barley. Groats sold today are already hulled, and steel-cut oats retain some bran, which is what the writer means by husks that irritate a delicate stomach.
- YieldAbout six to eight breakfast servings. Leftovers set firm enough to be sliced and fried in butter, a common use for the second day.
Oatmeal's arrival on American breakfast tables was recent when this book was compiled: oats had long been Scottish and Irish food, dismissed elsewhere as fodder, and it took mid-century milling and marketing to make them respectable. The named sources give away the trade of the moment "Akron" points to the Ohio mills of Ferdinand Schumacher, whose German Mills American Oatmeal works made the city a center of the business and eventually fed into what became Quaker Oats. The recipe's moralizing about "bone and muscle-producing food" for growing children reflects the period's confidence in cereal as a scientific improvement on a fried-meat breakfast, a case pressed hard by health reformers and, not coincidentally, by the millers themselves. The swipe at boarding-house porridge is a stock complaint of the era's cookery writers, for whom underdone oatmeal stood in for institutional cooking generally.