The Breakfast Bible by Seb Emina; Cara Shores

Author:Seb Emina; Cara Shores
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2007-07-19T20:00:00+00:00

Grains of Truth

The sad truth is that for all the breakfasts we might enjoy, it’s a bowl of commercial cereal that most of us go for, most of the time. It’s convenient, quick and more or less nice-tasting. The producers of these basic processed grains and pulses – flaked corn, puffed rice, baked wheat – hook us in ruthlessly when we are children, their cartoon mascots beaming out irresistibly from the cereal aisle, that dazzling cardboard Manhattan that is the only place in the supermarket that feels as though it belongs to us rather than our parents. On average, a person in the UK, USA or Ireland gets through 193 bowls of the stuff in a year. It would be disingenuous to claim that there aren’t times when most of us are struck with a craving for it, and that this should be resisted at all costs.

But porridge oats are better for you, and just better in general. Unlike cornflakes, they actually have a smell, a ‘slow smell’, as Jeanette Winterson once described it, ‘thick like a blanket’. And while it’s still simple to prepare, porridge is just complicated enough to inspire endlessly entertaining arguments about how to make it ‘best’ or, when it gets really heated, ‘correctly’. If you prefer something cold in your cereal bowl, consider developing a taste for Birchermuesli, which is more like porridge than its name implies. Or invent your own trademark granola, a substance that can be a lot more addictive than is suggested by its wholesome image.

PORRIDGE

It’s no coincidence that there are three bowls of porridge in the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, and not one of them is the same. That’s just within one family. Forget Bruno Bettelheim and his silly psychoanalytical interpretations – that fairytale is blatantly a piece of government propaganda designed to teach children the versatility of porridge. From Goldilocks we learn patience and perseverance: that we may have to taste three bowls of porridge, or more, before we come across one that is ‘just right’.

In its traditional Scottish form, porridge is made with just untreated oats, water and salt – nothing else. The Scots take their oats very seriously, and the national dish is cast in their own (albeit stereotypical) image. If porridge was a person, it would be Peter Capaldi: aggressive, yes, but also heartwarming.

It’s the oats, of course, that play the leading role here, and boy, are there a lot of them auditioning. It’s all to do with how they were treated in the grain. Purists favour untreated oatmeal, a category which includes steel-cut oats, which take longer to cook and, some would argue, require soaking overnight beforehand; and stone-ground coarse or medium oatmeal. Steel-cut are so-called because of the process by which they are made, the hulled grain of whole oats being cut into small pieces by a steel mill until the oats look like the heads of pins (they are also known as pinhead oats). Then there are rolled oats, which come

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