Porridge

Porridge (also known in American English as hot cereal), is a simple dish made by boiling oats (normally crushed oats, occasionally oatmeal) or another meal in water, milk or both. Oat and semolina porridge are by far the most popular varieties. Some other meals used for porridge include rice, wheat, peasemeal, barley, and cornmeal.

In many cultures, it is eaten as a breakfast, often with the addition of sugar or cream. As the traditional breakfast of Scotland, where it is also spelled porage, it is made with salt. Some manufacturers of breakfast cereal sell "ready-made" versions; aficionados question whether these can truly be called porridge. Gruel is a thin porridge made with water.

Porridge
Porridge: a stirring story
The snack in a pot that leaves a sandwich looking limp
Oatmeal & Porridge
Porridge Summary
Porridge & Oatmeal Thesaurus
Recipes

Porridge by Nicky Saunders

Porridge is a dish which has become associated with Scotland. It is made of oats stewed with either milk or water, and is served with salt or sugar and milk.

The first evidence for dishes resembling porridge is prehistoric. Neolithic farmers cultivated oats along with other crops. Various types of grains and grain meals could be stewed in water to form a thick porridge-like dish. Anglo Saxon sources describe "briw" or "brewit" made from rye meal, barley meal or oats served plain or with vegetables in. There are also references to some types of porridges being fermented.

Eighteenth Century cookbooks such as Hannah Glasse's "The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy", 1747, give recipes for "Water Gruel" made of oatmeal and water, and flavoured with butter and pepper. It might be served with wine sauce, sherry and dried fruits by rich people, whereas the poor ate the dish on its own. It could be served with any meal at any time of the day. Similar dishes included plumb porridge or barley gruel, made from barley and water, with dried fruit added. Burstin was made by roasting hulled barley grains and then grinding them, it could then be served with milk Frumenty was hulled wheat cooked with milk, cream and eggs and flavoured with spices.

Porridges and gruels were an easy way to cook grains. The grain only had to be cracked, not completely ground into flour. It could be cooked very simply in a pot at the edge of a fire. Bread required an oven to cook in.
It formed a basis for many dishes, both sweet and savoury. It was served with meat, stock or fat, as well as with vegetables, fruits, honey or spices. It could be allowed to cool and set in a "porridge drawer", and could then be sliced to be eaten cold or even fried. Sugar only became widely available in Britain in the Eighteenth Century, so it was probably not used on porridge before then.

Taken from Scotland on Sunday 2006-01-15
Porridge: a stirring story

Porridge has not always had a good press. True, 'porridge oats' appear in the Ian Dury song, 'Reasons to be Cheerful', just after 'Fanny Smith and Willy' and 'Being rather silly'. But more often - not just in Oliver Twist in which "each boy had one porringer, and no more - except on occasions of great public rejoicing" - it has been viewed as a watery symbol of deprivation.

The most pungent and patronising of these references is Dr Johnson's observation that oats were "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people".

Porridge, as Ronnie Barker understood, is a shorthand for punishment, and the culinary poverty of the Scots. These days, this attitude has hardened somewhat. If you listen for long enough in the wrong places, you may even hear the term "porridge wogs" used to express a general resentment about Scottishness.

Culinary racism is a long-standing tradition, though it is usually expressed more gently. Cosmo Gordon Lang (Archbishop of Canterbury 1928-42) once insulted an Edinburgh audience by flattering them with the observation: "If you take the shorter catechism, the psalms, and Sir Walter Scott, and mix them with porridge, you will breed a great race of men."

George Orwell, whose dislike of Scottish things was not aided by his tubercular years on Jura, opened his novel about the dreariness of life among the lower middle classes, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, by ruminating on the origins of the name of his hero, Gordon Comstock. "The 'Gordon' part of it was Scotch, of course. The prevalence of such names nowadays is merely a part of the Scotchification of England that has been going on these last 50 years. 'Gordon', 'Colin', 'Malcolm', 'Donald' - these are the gifts of Scotland to the world, along with golf, whisky, porridge, and the works of Barrie and Stevenson."

The ambiguity of that compliment is made plain in Orwell's autobiographical writing, where he reflected on the horror of the regime in his English prep school, focusing on one "filthy detail"; the pewter bowls from which the daily dose was administered. "They had overhanging rims, and under the rims there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in long strips. The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and more unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose."

Today, though, porridge has undergone something of a makeover. Its current fashionability is due in large part to the popularity of the GI Diet, which promotes foods with a low glycaemic index. It is also a good source of complex carbohydrates, which release energy slowly into the bloodstream. The oats are wholegrain. They have the natural goodness that is absent from processed cereals, and they can lower cholesterol and reduce constipation.

The oats can also reduce the risk of diabetes and, apparently, aid the libido. Among the other benefits claimed for porridge are: the ability to quell hangovers, heal the skin, pep up the immune system, tackle obesity, counter depression, reduce blood pressure and aid pregnancy.
Scotland on Sunday food writer Sue Lawrence - a judge in the annual Golden Spurtle global porridge-making contest - says it is this growing awareness of the health benefits that have led to the growing fashionability of porridge, along with a growing appreciation of "peasant" foods.

"We're realising that it's such a healthy food, and why on earth did we give it up in the first place? Everybody always used to eat porridge in Scotland and then we went onto the horrible sugary cereals. Porridge is part of our heritage and at last we're realising that we should get back to the way we used to eat."

The cook Clarissa Dickson Wright has personal experience of the health-giving properties of porridge. "I remember when I had adhesions on a scar that I'd had after an operation, and the specialist, a Scotsman, said to me: 'Eat porridge'. At that point I'd rather stopped eating porridge every day, and within two or three weeks the adhesions had stopped sticking to themselves. I then got terribly obsessed."

Before becoming our national dish, porridge has a mottled history. The Roman armies were fed on oatmeal, and 18th-century recipe books contain instructions for an attractively-named "Water Gruel". Guthrie Hutton's book, A Bowl of Porridge, notes the existence of an anti-Jacobite song in which Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops were derided for cooking oatmeal in cold water.
The sense that porridge is a food of the poor is underlined in Stevenson's Kidnapped, where the miserly Ebenezer Balfour chows down on a bowl of oats, despite his huge wealth, exclaiming: "They're fine, halesome food - they're grand food, parritch."

Most cooks agreed on the recipe of this fine, wholesome food. The current holder of the prestigious Golden Spurtle, Lynn Benge of the Pines Country House at Duthil, Carrbridge, recommends one cup oatmeal, 3 equal cups of water, 1 cup milk, oz knob of butter, and teaspoon of salt.

Traditionalists may balk at the butter, and some will prefer to use water not milk, but all are agreed on the method: add the oats to the pan, add the liquid, and stir. "Bring to the boil, add butter and salt, keep stirring. Stir until thickens."

The key, says Benge, a Yorkshirewoman with over 30 years Scottish residency, is the stirring. "You have to keep stirring all the time. Otherwise you do get lumps in it."

Lawrence says the salt is the crucial ingredient - a pinch, added near the end of the process, so as not to inhibit the swelling of the oats. "A pinch per pot. You can always add a little more at the end. It's best to start off under-salting."

She also recommends proper oatmeal. "Porridge oats are fine, and they can be quicker, but it just improves the texture - it gives it a nice, rough, nutty texture."

There are, of course, other considerations. "The judges keep telling me you must always stir to the right," says Benge. "If you stir to the left, you evoke the devil. You don't want that in your porridge."
Dickson Wright's recipe is more spartan. "For proper porridge, you soak your pinhead oatmeal overnight and boil it up in the morning and cook it quickly and stir it with your spurtle and stir it with a bit of salt," she says. "I don't actually go as far as having the porridge in one bowl and the milk in the other, which is what my father used to do ... And then you eat it.

"It's totally simple to make. If you buy medium-ground oatmeal then you don't even have to soak it. If you buy porridge oats it only takes 10 minutes to cook." To serve, Lawrence suggests a sprinkling of wheatgerm on top, and a moat of milk. "Never milk on top."

The spurtle - a wooden stirring stick - is favoured over a wooden spoon because it breaks down lumps. There have been some suggestions that it was Graham Kerr, television's Galloping Gourmet, who popularised the spurtle, but Lawrence is adamant that this is not so. "My parents were born in 1923, and they were brought up with that thing called a spurtle. One of my grandfathers called it a theevil, and that's in the Angus area. But the spurtle has been around for ever."

Of course, the growing popularity of porridge has led to some faddish deviations from the correct path. The Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal built a reputation on snail porridge, though it has only scant similarity to the breakfast dish we know. At the Golden Spurtle Awards, Benge offered speciality porridge with raspberries, apples, vanilla vodka and cream. "That is really nice. If you like the Mullerice pots, it's very similar to that."

She recommends it as a dessert "You could have it as a breakfast if you wanted to really start the day." Another prize winner did something with caramelised marshmallows. But tradition has some peculiar departures from the norm, not least in St Kilda. "They used to boil a puffin in their porridge," says Lawrence. "They used to sometimes roast the birds, but for their morning porridge, a puffin was very often boiled in the oats. They had no salt on the island. These seabirds were inherently very salty. So that would be a flavouring of the sea, because porridge always needs a little bit of salt to bring out the flavour."

Traditionalists may also recall that many Scots households used to store porridge in a kitchen drawer and serve it cold by the slice. "My grandfather was a doctor," recalls Dickson Wright. "He had a practice in Govan. All the people in the tenements did it. My father said that when he went with his father round the tenements, they all had porridge in a drawer, and they said: 'Will you take some porridge?' because they didn't have much else. If my grandfather said yes, they'd pour boiling water over it and reconstitute it. Fuel was very hard to come by and so you'd cook up a big batch once a week and then pour it into the drawer, and it set, and then you could either eat it cold as a piece or you re-constituted it."

(But be warned: urban legend has it that the last recorded case of scurvy in Scotland was a student who spent all his money on extra-curricular activities and fell back on the porridge-in-drawer method of eating cheaply.)

The modern equivalent, recommended by Lawrence, is to make a weekly batch and freeze it in bags to be microwaved each morning. This may be practical, but the introduction of the microwave removes some of the poetry from our national dish. It is better, surely, to think of porridge as it appears in the work of the poet and performer Ivor Cutler, whose autobiographical tales make the Broons appear decadent.

In Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Volume 2, Episode 6, Cutler tells how his grandfather used to enrich the diet of his offspring by feeding them herring, rolled in a deep batter of leftover porridge, cooked on a "a hot griddle athwart the coal fire". After exactly 25 minutes, "the porridge cracked, and juice steamed through with a glad 'fizz'. We ate the batter first, to take the edge off our appetites, so that we could eat the herring with respect; which we did, including the bones.

"After supper, assuming the herring to have worked, we were asked questions. In Latin, Greek and Hebrew, we had to know the principle parts of verbs. In geography, the five main glove manufacturing towns in the Midlands. And in history, the development of Glasgow's sewage system.

"There's nothing quite like a Scotch education. One is left with an irreparable debt. My head is full of irregular verbs still."

top

The snack in a pot that leaves a sandwich looking limp

MOST hungry lunchers, I suspect, would rather opt for a sandwich and a packet of crisps than a pot of warm, fresh porridge - however well prepared, attractively presented and nutritious it may be.
But three college graduates in Edinburgh believe they have found the successor to Britain's sandwich and burger-based fast food industry in one of the oldest meals of them all.

Last week Scotland opened its first permanent porridge bar.

"It's fun, it's new and it's Scottish," chirped its founders Anthony Stone, Sean McNeill and Bob Arnott. So, hungry and in need of lunch I headed down to Stoats porridge bar on the north side of Edinburgh's Meadows to put their claims to the test.

The first thing the approaching customer notices is not the porridge itself but the double takes of pedestrians. For what looks like a hot dog stand is in fact an oatmeal emporium offering the fast food fan a choice of eight different recipes. From the traditional Stoater, literally salted porridge, to Cranachan, a blend of raspberries, toasted oats and cream. "It's an indulgence," says Stone. "A healthy indulgence."

The portions range in price from £2.20 to £3.50, and I pass over the chunky orange marmalade, pear, sultana and crushed almonds, white chocolate and roasted hazelnut, and opt for the Cranachan. "I had the idea when I was travelling a lot between Cardiff and Edinburgh," says Stone as he prepares my cardboard pot of porridge.

"I was flying a great deal and eating on the go virtually all the time. What I noticed was that while there was a lot of fast food available it was all wheat based. Bread, in large quantities, isn't good for you." After reading a newspaper article that sales of porridge oats had risen 25% Stone found an alternative.

The Cranachan arrives in a rather swish cardboard pot of the type that luxury ice-cream is more normally found in. Inside, a large raspberry sits on a bed of warm oats crowned with a small circle of cream. After one mouthful it is surprisingly light and tart. The sharp, sweetness of the raspberry marries well with the saltiness of the porridge. The texture is superb. Not too light and not too heavy.
Stone says this is down to his unique blend. "There are two types of oats on the market," he says. "Traditional, which is ground either course, fine or medium or the modern method, which is cut. This is where a machine cuts the grains into small pieces." Stoats uses a blend of the two.

Next I try Whisky and Honey. Like a rich chocolate mousse, it is hard not to overstate the pleasure this small pot of porridge gives. The sweetness of the honey soothes the whisky's spicy, hoppy flavour. And the saltiness of the oats gives the palate a real bite. It's like eating a hot toddy on an enormous velvet sofa and proves that healthy eating can be delicious.

"We use two-thirds water, one-third semi-skimmed milk and cook for 40 minutes on a slow heat," says Stone. "Slow soaking and cooking of organic oats soften the mix."

Lynn Dobson, a lecturer of politics at Edinburgh University, is a new regular at the bar. She likes to have a pot of the Brown Sugar and Double Cream for lunch. "I like the taste," she says. "The fact it is healthy is a bonus. It's a very good all-day snack."

Matt Beilby has been coming for a few days. He also works at the university and has got into the habit of having porridge for lunch. "It's supposed to be very healthy and help prevent all sorts of things," he says. "I'm not sure about that, but I do find it is a very good pick me up and gives me a mental boost."

top

Oatmeal & Porridge

Porridge can be made from just about any grain that has been hulled and mechanically broken in some manner. It is then cooked in milk or water until soft. But oats are by far the most common grain used, and they are available rolled, steel-cut and stone-ground. Oatmeal has a long tradition in Scotland, where in many areas very few crops could be grown in the climatic conditions and the poorly drained soils. Oats and barley were the exceptions. Oats do particularly well in the long summer days experienced in Scotland.

So for many Scots, oats were the staple crop and diet. Until the advent of industrial processing, the crop would be stone ground at a watermill. The coarsest stoneground oats are termed pinhead oats, which resembles steelcut oats. A lot of oats were eaten as 'brose'. The oatmeal was placed in a bowl, and covered with boiling water. A pat of butter might be added, and then the bowl covered with a plate to let the brose cook in its own steam for five minutes. Then milk would be added and the brose eaten. Because it doesn't have time to swell as much as fully cooked porridge, a larger mass could be eaten in one meal, hence the idea that a bowl of oats for breakfast will last one all day.

Today, most porridge is cooked with rolled oats, which are processed by steaming the oats and rolling them into flakes. But many porridge gourmets recommend using steel-cut oats. This process chops each seed into three or four chunks, so it produces porridge with a much chewier texture.

The Golden Spurtle award is made annually in Carrbridge, Scotland, to the World Porridge Making Champion. Their website http://www.goldenspurtle.com includes a very comprehensive page devoted to porridge.

top

Porridge Summary

Porridge … "Chief of Scotia's Food' as Rabbie Burns described it - accompanied by a bowl of creamy milk has sustained generations of hardy Scots at home and abroad.

Traditions and myth surround the making of porridge, some say the oatmeal was to be added in batches, some say at the beginning and some say it ought to be added half way through the cooking to produce a nuttier flavour and interesting texture.

Some say porridge should only be stirred in a clock wise direction using the right hand so you don't evoke the 'Devil'. The stirring is done with a straight wooden spoon /stick without a moulded or flat end and known is Scotland as a 'Spurtle' or 'Theevil'. Porridge should always be spoken of as 'they' and old custom states that it should be eaten standing up. A bone spoon should always be used for eating porridge.

Porridge has various names in the different parts of Scotland:

'lite' leetch-yuh Gaelic for porridge
'milgruel' in Shetland
'tartan-purry' is the thin porridge made with the liquor in which kale has been cooked.

Some say that porridge should be allowed to stand and than be re-heated, others say that it should be made the day before it is to be eaten.

In older times a 'porridge drawer' in crofters kitchens dressers was filled with fresh cooked porridge and when cold was cut into squares for the crofter to take onto the hills for sustenance. [Maybe the origin of the snack lies here and 'snacking was a Scottish invention as well].

There is a misapprehension that porridge made from meal takes a long time to cook, but be assured it takes only as long as it takes to set the breakfast table.

There is nothing easier and healthier than a bowl of porridge a day - especially in these days of cholesterol reduced diets of modern life and well, Porridge is a great provider of fibre as well.

top

Porridge & Oatmeal Thesaurus

Taken from 'The Scots Thesaurus'. ISBN 1-902930-03-7.
The following all relate to oatmeal and porridge making:

ait, oat: ~s oats. aiten oaten.

• Athole brose - honey or meal mixed with whisky chiefly Highland.

• † blanter - food made from oats, eg bread, porridge.

• blenshaw - a drink made of oatmeal, sugar, milk, water and nutmeg.

• brat - the thick(er) surface on a liquid etc, eg curdled cream on milk, skin on porridge.

• brochan - thick or thin gruel (with butter, honey etc); sometimes (especially Arygll, Ulster) porridge.

• brose - a dish of oat- or pease-meal mixed with boiling water or milk, with salt and butter etc added.

• cauld steer(ie) - oatmeal stirred in cold water (or sour milk), cold brose now North-Perth.

• crackins - a dish of fried oatmeal now North-East.

• crannachan - cream crowdie a desert of soft fruit, whipped cream, toasted oatmeal etc.

• creeshie - mealie oatmeal fried in fat West Angus.

• crowdie, - † ~-mowdie oatmeal and water mixed and eaten raw.

• deochray - a kind of sowans chiefly Caithness.

• drammlicks - the small pieces of oatmeal dough which stick to the basin when making oatcakes now Aberdeen drammock a mixture of raw oatmeal and cold water local Aberdeen-Kirkcudbright.

• foorach - buttermilk, whipped cream or whey with oatmeal stirred in Banff, Aberdeen.

• froh milk a mixture of cream and whey beaten up and sprinkled with oatmeal North-East, Angus.

• girsle a fragment of crisp or caked porridge etc.

• girnel, garnel, - † girner a storage chest for meal etc.

• † graddan - a coarse oatmeal made from parched grain ground by hand.

• grits - oat kernels, grain.

• gruel - 1 gruel; porridge. 2 food made of oatmeal; food in general, now Shetland, Orkney.

• grunds - grounds a kind of sowans.

• hasty brose - a kind of quickly-made brose North-East.

• kail brose: brose made with the liquid from boiled kail now North Perth, Ayr.

• kill, kiln: - jocular, cast the quantity of oats taken to the mill at one time to be ground into meal, for household use, usually enough to produce four bolls now Wigtown.

• lithocks - a kind of gruel made from fine oatmeal and frequently buttermilk now Stirling, West Lothian, West Central.

• luggie - a small wooden bowl etc with one or two handles formed from projecting staves, frequently used for serving milk with porridge now local North-Roxburgh.

• meal - male oatmeal as distinct from other kinds, which have defining terms.

• meal an ale - the traditional dish (also containing whisky) at harvest-home celebrations; also the celebration itself North-East-Perth.

• † meal an thrammel - meal stirred up with water or ale, taken as a snack North-East.

• neep brose - brose made with the liquid in which turnips have been boiled chiefly North-East, Ulster.

• nettle brose - brose made with the juice of boiled young nettle-tops North-East.

• † pap-in - a drink made of light ale and oatmeal with a small quantity of whisky or brandy.

• pease, pizz pease - peasie made of or like ~-meal. ~-brose, ~ pistils a dish made of ~-meal and boiling water stirred to a paste.

• † kill - a quantity of peas roasted as in (originally in) a kiln. ~-meal a flour made of ground pease.

• parritch - porridge, poshie child's word noun, formerly frequently treated as a plural porridge, the dish of oatmeal (or rolled oats) boiled in salted water.

• pot stick - a stick for stirring porridge etc in cooking, a spurtle now South-West, Ulster.

• pottage - formerly frequently treated as a plural oatmeal porridge now North-East. milk ~ porridge made with milk instead of water now North-East.

• † purry - a savoury dish consisting of oatmeal brose with chopped kail stirred into it.

• skink - a kind of thin, oatmeal-and-water gruel.

• skirlie, skirl-in-the-pan - now Caithness, West Angus, Perth a dish of oatmeal and onions fried in a pan.

• snap & rattle - toasted oatcakes crumbled in milk North-East.

• sowans - a dish made from oat husks and fine meal steeped in water for about a week; after straining, the liquor was again left to ferment and separate, the solid matter at the bottom being the sowans, the liquor swats, usually eaten like porridge, boiled with water and salt.

• sowan seeds - the rough husks of oats used in making sowans now Caithness, North-East.

• sowan-swats - the liquid poured off sowans now Shetland, Orkney, Caithness drinking ~ now North-East, knotting ~ North-East the liquor left after straining sowans but before fermenting, usually thickened a little by heating.

• sowce - a (messy) mixture of food, specifically some oatmeal dish such as porridge now Caithness.

• spurtle, spurkle - Northern, Central - 1 a long-handled, flat-bladed implement for turning oatcakes, scones etc now West Angus, Perth. - 2 a short tapering stick for stirring porridge, soup etc General but rare in Angus.

• stourie now Orkney, stoorack Northern, stoorin North-East, West Angus, ie drink now West Angus, Perth - a kind of liquid fine-oatmeal gruel.

• tartan purry - a dish of boiled oatmeal mixed with chopped red cabbage or boiled with cabbage water.

• theevil now local North-Dumfries, theedle now local Caithness-Fife - a short tapering stick used to stir food as it cooks, a spurtle.

• turning tree - a wooden stick for stirring now Shetland.

• wangrace - a kind of thin gruel sweetened with fresh butter and honey etc, and given to invalids.

• water broo now Fife, Lothian, water brose now Northern - oatmeal mixed with boiling water.

† Obsolete words. If you come across any words or meanings marked obsolete which you know to be still used in some part of the country, please let the Scottish National Dictionary Association know.

top

Recipes

The following recipes are divided into
'Porridge Recipes',
'Traditional Oatmeal Recipes' and
'Modern Oatmeal Recipes'.

Key: M contains meat; V vegetarian, Vn vegan.

Porridge - V Recipe: Duncan Hilditch, Chef/Proprietor of the Ecclefechan Bistro, Carrbridge. World Porridge Making Champion. Take one cup of oatmeal and put into a saucepan with four cups of cold water. Stir gently over a medium heat until it reaches simmering point, lower the heat and continue to stir - to avoid any lumps - for five minutes. Add half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of sugar, and half a cup of buttermilk or cream. Give a final good stir and serve in a warm bowl. Duncan's ideal way to enjoy porridge... Wait for a grey, cold day in winter. Sit down with your porridge, sprinkle with some soft brown sugar, drizzle some double cream round it, put on a Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain tape and eat your porridge. For a short time at least you'll think that you're in heaven!	Porridge - V Recipe: Scott Chance, Chef/Proprietor of the Harbour Inn, Bowmore, Islay: World Porridge Making Champion 1998/1999. 4oz Oatmeal 5 fl oz milk 1 pint boiling water 1 level teaspoon of salt Mix oatmeal and milk together to form a paste, then add the boiling water. Heat and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in salt and serve.
Porridge in microwave - V Recipe: Douglas Cassidy - email contribution. As a Scotsman this is probably sacrileges but here is what I do of a morning . . Half cup of oats. . . cup of water . . dod of SALT . .into a Pyrex bowl. . into the MICROWAVE . . set for three minutes . .go to the lavvy . . wash 'n' brush up . . . stir porridge . . pour into bowl. . . add milk . . put on table . . turn on news programme . . eat!	2004 Winning Speciality Porridge Recipe: 'Porridge Supreme' by Lynn Benge Ingredients: 1 eating apple sliced and diced. Microwave with few drops of lemon juice & 1 tablespoon vanilla vodka for 1.45 mins; ½ lb of Raspberries with 3 tablespoons sweetener (mix together, stand until required); ½ cup of oatmeal; 3 equal cups of water; 1 equal cup of milk; 1 knob of butter; 1 sachet sugar; ¼ pint cream mixed with 1 tablespoon icing sugar, mixed until thick To decorate: 1 tablespoon brown sugar and aerosol cream. Method: Add oatmeal to pan, mix in water, stirring all the time, bring to boil, add butter stirring all the time. Mix in sachet of sugar, stand to cool. When cool add cream, mix well, leave to stand. Add fruit mixture, mix well. Serve into small dishes, decorate with brown sugar at edges. Add aerosol cream in centre, top with brown sugar. And enjoy…

Traditional Oatmeal Recipes
Cranachan - V 100g (4oz) Scottish Oatmeal 500ml (1 pint) Whipping Cream 250g (8oz) Raspberries Caster Sugar to taste 1 tblsp Whisky (optional) Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F, Gas 4) Toast oatmeal in oven for 10-15 minutes until lightly browned. Whip cream and sugar until stiff (add whisky if using). Place in layers in individual glasses, starting with the fruit and finishing with cream. Decorate with fruit. Chill and serve. Recipe: Hamlyn's of Scotland
Steamed Skirlie (Oatmeal Stuffing) - M, V 200g (8oz) Scottish Oatmeal 125g (4oz) Suet (or Veg Suet or oil) 1 Large Onion, finely chopped 2-3 tbsp Milk Salt and Pepper Mix oatmeal and suet and season. Combine with chopped onion and milk. Place in a 1 pint pudding basin, cover and steam for 1 hour.

Modern Oatmeal Recipes
Savoury Cheese Scones - V 100g (4 oz) Scottish Oatmeal 100g (4 oz) Plain Flour 50g (2 oz) Mature Cheese, grated 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda 1 tsp Cream of Tartar Pinch of Salt and Paprika 40g (1 ½ oz) Butter or Margarine 1 Egg beaten Approx 150ml (1/4 pint) milk Preheat oven to 230°C (450°F, Gas 8) Mix dry ingredients, rub in butter of margarine, then mix in grated cheese. Add milk and egg to make a softish dough. Knead lightly, divide dough into two rounds and mark in quarters. Bake for approximately 12 minutes. Serve warm. Recipe: Hamlyn's of Scotland	Cream of Onion Soup - M, V, Vn 1 large Onion, chopped 1 tblsp Butter or oil 2 tblsp Scottish Oatmeal 500ml (1 pint) Chicken or Vegetable Stock 250ml (1/2 pint) Milk Salt and Pepper Melt butter in saucepan. Add onion and cook until soft, not brown. Add oatmeal and seasoning and cook for a few minutes. Add stock slowly, stirring all the time. Bring to the boil, cover then simmer for 30 minutes. Liquidise until smooth. Add milk and heat through. Serve garnished with cream and parsley. Recipe: Hamlyn's of Scotland
Oatmeal Potato Rissoles - V 500g (1lb) Potatoes, peeled 1 Small Onion, chopped 1 Egg, beaten 75g (3oz) Mature Cheddar, grated 100g (4oz) Scottish Oatmeal Beaten Egg to coat Salt and Pepper Vegetable Oil for Cooking Boil then mash potatoes and mix with the finely chopped onion, cheese and beaten egg. Leave to cool in the fridge. When cool, shape into patties, dip in the beaten egg, then in oatmeal to coat. Cook the patties in a little oil for 2-3 minutes on each side until brown.

meditations

top