A Month of Porridge

Bistrot Bruno Loubet

This restaurant in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell, London, doesn't sound like a place to get porridge.  But it is open from 7:30 on a Sunday morning (it is attached to the Zetter Hotel), it is bright and light, not too crowded or noisy, and it has good service.  The accompaniments were particularly good - excellent coffee, orange juice, and fruit salad. The porridge is made from Scottish rolled oats (the waiter reported). It is not very smooth, perhaps because it is not cooked for as long as I would cook it. But it had a very good and subtle date syrup in it. It also looked good for people who want something other than porridge for breakfast. A particularly pleasant place to spend a rainy morning. 

Goat's cheese and porridge

The cheese stall in the market has some very mild, very soft Irish goat's cheese, and Tess won't eat it, so I made oat porridge just with water and salt and imagined it was mamaliga.  After the photo I also added some toasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

The Settle Down Cafe, Newcastle

The Settle Down is a small independent cafe on a side street near the trainstation in Newcastle, the kind of cafe with newspapers, toys, and lots of posters for counterculture events.  I went there for a coffee (excellent) and then asked where I could find porridge.  Though porridge was nowhere to be found on their extensive blackboard menu, they offered to make it.  It came plain, but with salt, sugar, and milk offered alongside, and I enjoyed it very much, while reading the Guardian and listening to a conversation about starting up a microbrewery.

 

 

Valentine's porridge

Porridge 2.0

I thought when I started this blog that it would be one of many by porridge obsessives, perhaps forming a ring of blogs or a PorridgeNet.  Apparently not. Something called ‘The Porridge Blog’ had a happy period of activity in 2010, mostly suggestions for toppings, and expressions of delight, but it was on Facebook, and is dormant.

Twitter is much more promising.  Almost any day, the tag #porridge will lead to a dozen or so tweets from around the world, often with pictures.  Yesterday’s feed included two tweets promoting @brewteabar on Bold Street in Liverpool (sounds good, must try it), a photograph of Korean porridge, an iPhone photo of the breakfast in bed made for a boyfriend.  Two were just using the phrase for disgust, ‘puts you off your porridge’, and three were using the #porridge tag to suggest what they think should happen to Tottenham Hotspur manager harry Redknapp (‘porridge’ is British slang for a term in prison).  That leaves two from the @porridgelady, who manages to get her porridge message across in 140 characters, but I don’t feel competitive because she is usually more interested toppings.  Porridge obsessives may want to follow her.

Twitter is much more promising.  Almost any day, the tag #porridge will get a dozen or so tweets from around the world, often with pictures.  Yesterday’s feed included two tweets promoting @brewteabar on Bold Street in Liverpool (sounds good,must ty it), a photograph of Korean porridge, an iPhone photo of the breakfast in bed made for a boyfriend.  Two were just using the phrase for disgust, ‘puts you off your porridge’, and three were using the #porridge tag to suggest what they think should happen to Tottenham Hotspur manager harry Redknapp (‘porridge’ is British slang for a term in prison).  That leaves two from the @porridgelady, who covers porridge, local foods, and organic foods, all in 140 characters.  

The Flickr ‘porridge’ tag leads to hundreds of images from around the world:  http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=porridge.  Even a glance teaches several lessons: 

1)  most people in the world are having some other grain than oats as the basis of their porridge, for instance rice in some sort of congee,

2) most attention is given to toppings, and

3) porridge is hard to photograph.  The smooth, beige surface doesn’t give much to go on, so most photos including mine) focus on the banana or the bowl.  See however the examples from  Drift Words and Island Vittles (both food photographers, it seems) for lessons in how to do it.

It’s not surprising that porridge flourishes in Twitter and Flickr rather than blogs.  As we saw in the last post, the pleasure of porride is in the routine, so while most people are not moved to essays on the topic, dozens every day look down at the steaming bowl and snap an iPhoto picture.

 

 

Porridge in Literature IV: Porridge Shared

In an earlier post I quoted a lovely poem by Elizabeth Burns.  She responded by leading me to two other poems about porridge – or about how one is linked to other people through preparing and eating it.

The first is by James McGonigal, and was published in The Dark Horse 24 (Winter 2009.2010) http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com (my thanks for the permission to quote it).

 

First Things

My granny made porridge first thing

with the same untroubled movements

of hand and eye, the same patience

that she gave to her night prayers.

 

It is a holy and wholesome thought

to eat porridge and pray for the dead

every day of your life, I now think,

reaching down a white bowl from its shelf.

 

The ‘first things’ are both the things he learned from his grandmother, the kind of life she represented, and the routine of porridge as the first thing in the morning, as prayers are for her the last thing as night.  I think I can call it a porridge poem, because the porridge is not incidental.  Porridge here can’t be replaced with bacon and eggs or muesli;  it is part of a routine, it takes time (particularly if one sets out the pinhead oats to soak the night before) and it takes attention, the ‘untroubled movements / of hand and eye’.  I like the way in the second stanza the line-ending noun ‘thought’ parallels and contrasts with the verb ‘I think’; the general moral, with the generic ‘you’, changes to ‘I now think’, and the ‘I’ in the present reenacting the movement and coming to this understanding. I’m thinking about the white bowl.

Elizabeth also led me to Galway Kinnell’s wonderful ‘Oatmeal’:

 

‘I am aware that it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.

Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.'

 

So he invites Keats. 

I won’t quote more because the poem is on-line with the poet’s wonderfully deadpan reading:  http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=2641

Again the porridge is not incidental, not just what he happens to choose for breakfast.  In the lines I have quoted, there is an echo of the standard advice about alcohol, and he goes on to give one of the most unappealing descriptions in all these literary porridges, which is saying a lot. While in ‘First Things’ the porridge links to his grandmother and a tradition of living, in ‘Oatmeal’ it links to Keats and a tradition of poetry as a practical, everyday craft, the great poets sharing their working processes. 

Reading about the Kinnell poem led me to Jeffrey Cane Robinson, who tracked down another bit of porridge and poetry I’ve come across several times as a kind of proverbial expression: ‘What porridge had John Keats?’ OK, you knew already, but I didn’t, though I should have – it is the last line of Robert Browning’s ‘Popularity’.  It is a part of a very complex analogy to the poetic tradition, but if I read it right, the later flashier poets get the turtle soup and claret that comes with popular success, while the poet who made this possible (who fished out the source of the brilliant colour in the poem’s metaphor), eats porridge.  (Oh no, porridge as poverty again).  So I guess Browning's poem is one reason Kinnell invites Keats and not that other porridge eater, Wordsworth.

 

Porridge around Covent Garden

While breakfast places in the North, even very good ones, still offer the same fry-up, sometimes in a vegetarian version, in London there seem to be lots of good places to get porridge.  I tried two near Covent Garden. Kopapa is a cafe that serves posh food in the evenings;  in the mornings they serve fresh orange juice and porridge with blueberry conserve and crème fraiche.  The coffee is particularly good (but it's just up the street from the great Monmouth Coffee, so the competition is strong around here).

A bit further south, Bill's is in St. Martin's Courtyard, a new development off Long Acre and St. Martin's that is disconcertingly like a shopping mall, surrounding you with brands.  It is decorated in retro-grocery-store, with jars and tines on shleves going up two storeys.  In keeping with the decor, the container for the cutlery in the middle of the table is an old tin of Irish pinhead oatmeal.  But that is not what they use for their porridge;  the Bill's cookbook, for sale in the shop, says to use instant oatmeal, such as Ready Brek.  Maybe I've been unfair to instant oatmeal. If that's what they used (the waiter wouldn't say) it was still pretty good, much more solid and gummy than what I make, but still welcome.  It was topped with bananas, honey and (the USP) toasted hazelnuts. Note the sprig of mint, and the way the honey is drizzled on, not mixed in.

What the Oxford cafe in the last post and these two have in common is that there is more attention to the topping than to the oatmeal. In both places, the poridge took about ten minutes to make. That probably makes sense; only a big place like the Wolseley or a hotel that makes a feature of their porridge will have enough call for it to have a pot that has cooked slowly to use regular rolled oats or pinhead oats cooked for a long time, or pinhead oats soaked overnight, to make a smooth, creamy porridge.  If the oatmeal is all the same, then the way to make it different is with a topping a bit more elaborate (or fattening) or a presentation a bit more careful than one would have at home.

Oxford

I was looking for porridge before a meeting in Oxford, and found it at Morton's in the Covered Market.  It is made with rolled porridge oats, and takes about ten minutes to make.  OK, it's mainly honey and bananas, but it was very welcome.  The coffee was good too.

 

Feeding the Hens

I volunteered to feed a friend's hens and guinea pigs while they went away for Christmas.  The instructions came with a long list of foods not to be fed to guinea pigs (potato skins, iceberg lettuce) but hens seem to be fairly omnivorous, and the owner said that they particularly liked porridge.  On Christmas Eve I tried oatmeal; they were a bit suspicious of it at first, but then they ate it all.

The next day I gave them leftover mamaliga, made with goat's cheese, and they liked that much more.  Now that my chicken-tending duties are over, Tess suggested that since we were not making desserts this Christmas, I just switched my energies from baking for us to cooking for the hens.

Oats are often disparaged as a food that is eaten by animals as well as humans, as in Dr. Johnson's famous definition. (Indeed, our friend Sara explained how to make porridge for horses, not one of the recipes I will share here). The same sorts of jibes are made about vegetarian cooking ('rabbit food'). Since both hens and people like porridge, I guess I will have to find other ways to distinguish myself from other species.

The hens I was feeding had plenty of room to roam.  Commercially-farmed hens are not so lucky, but as of Sunday, an EU directive means they must have at least a basic minimum space and some welfare provisions. 

Happy New Year!

Millet porridge - and a postscript on quinoa

Millet is the ur-porridge.  According to an excellent article in Wikipedia, it is not one seed at all, but the seeds of various plants around the world that are all raised and cooked the same way.  It was cultivated 10,000 years ago, and it’s one of the seeds they found in the stomach of the Iron Age (about 500 BCE) bog bodies in Jutland, Seamus Heaney mentions the seeds in  stomach in his poem on Tollund Man. it was the staple of many cultures before maize was imported from the Western Hemisphere, and it is still a staple of millions of people today in Africa and Asia, and the porridge is a common food for weaning.  Clare across the street told me that when she was in Senegal, she ate a porridge made from green millet (rather than the yellow kind we get in the UK) every day. Recently Carolyn Phillips reported on a simple Chinese version that is a lot like congee.

I based my rather more fancy porridge on a recipe based on that from Lizzie’s Kitchen at WholeFoodMatters.  The principle of this and related seed porridges seems to be cooking the grains first, and then adding more liquid.

¼ cup millet grain

½ cup water

¼ cup chopped apricots

¼ cup chopped dates

toasted sunflower seeds

toasted pumpkin seeds

grated cinnamon

grated orange

1 cup soy milk

[Lizzie’s Kitchen also added some maple syrup]

I rinsed the millet in a sieve, and cooked it in the water for fifteen minutes until the water was absorbed, and then fluffed it with a fork.  Then I added the other ingredients and cooked it for fifteen minutes more, in the double boiler.  It turned into a rather thick but tasty mound. 

It doesn’t seem to me to be as pleasantly filling as oatmeal. Tess showed an interest, because she had liked millet porridge in Finland, but this wasn’t at all what she had in mind, since it looks more like a dinner side dish than a breakfast porridge.  I’ll look for some millet meal and see if that reproduces better what she remembers.

Feasts and Fotos has a very similar recipe for quinoa, cooking it first (or using leftover cooked quinoa).  There is a nice touch of a teaspoon of yoghurt at the end, which does make it smoother and more porridge-like.