Best Mode of Cooking Oat Me-al
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Soak one pint of oat meal in warm water for a few hours before cooking.
Cook and serve
Put the soaked mixture into boiling water, add a little salt, and let it cook slowly for half an hour or longer.
Serve hot or cold with butter and sugar or with cream and sugar.
Variations
For a heartier dish, cook the oat meal with the water in which meat has been boiled, skim off the fat, and serve with the meat as a vegetable.
For soup, cook meat until very tender, remove it from the bones, chop finely, and cook with oat meal.
For pudding, take eggs, milk, sugar, raisins, and cinnamon, and cook as for other puddings.
For the invalid, make it thin like gruel, and serve with sugar and milk or cream.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures. See the original page.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Oat meal
- Forms the body of the dish as it swells and softens during slow cooking.
The step that matters
Slow cooking the soaked oat meal. Oats need prolonged simmering in liquid so the starch gelatinises and the grain softens fully; cooking too briefly leaves a raw, pasty texture.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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