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Steamed Oat-Meal
To one tea-cup oat-meal add one quart cold water, tea-spoon salt, put in steamer over a kettle of cold water, and steam one hour and in steamer over a kettle of cold water, and steam one hour and a half after meal begins to cook.
A double-boiler porridge from the era before rolled oats, when "oat-meal" meant coarse cut grain that needed hours of gentle heat. The method still works, and it is close to unburnable.
- Which oats"Oat-meal" here means steel-cut or coarse-ground Scotch oats rather than the rolled flakes that later displaced them; rolled oats were being milled and sold from the late 1870s but coarse meal was still what home recipes of this kind assumed. Use steel-cut oats for the intended result; rolled oats in this ratio and time will collapse into paste.
- The ratioA teacup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure varied from book to book; that gives roughly 3/4 cup oats to 4 cups water, looser than most current steel-cut recipes. Expect a soft, pourable porridge rather than a stiff one; cut the water to 3 cups for a thicker bowl.
- "Steamer over a kettle"This is a double boiler, not a perforated vegetable steamer. The oats sit in water in the upper pan, and the boiling water beneath supplies indirect heat. A metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water does the same job.
- Timing the hour and a halfThe clock starts when the meal itself is actually hot and bubbling, not when the pot goes on — the phrase "after meal begins to cook" is the whole point of the sentence. Allow 15 to 20 minutes to reach that stage, then 90 minutes more.
- Cold water startBoth the porridge water and the kettle water begin cold. Starting the lower pan with already-boiling water shortens the process and does no harm.
- SaltA teaspoon in this quantity is assertive by current habit but correct for oats, which taste flat without it. Salt at the start; it does not toughen the grain.
- YieldLittle water is lost in a covered double boiler, so expect close to four cups cooked, serving three or four. Leftovers set firm in the refrigerator and can be sliced and fried in butter, a common period treatment for cold porridge.
Steamed oatmeal belongs to the long-cooking tradition that American cookbooks inherited from Scotland, where coarse oatmeal simmered for an hour or more was ordinary breakfast fare. Its appearance in a Southern compilation like The Dixie Cook Book reflects the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for oats as a wholesome, cheap and supposedly digestible grain — an enthusiasm often attributed to the new milling companies and to health writers of the period. The double-boiler method was practical rather than fussy: on a wood or coal range, direct heat scorched cereal readily, and a pot suspended over boiling water could be left largely unattended while the rest of breakfast was made. Rolled oats would within a generation cut this hour and a half down to minutes, and recipes like this one out of the books.