The Great Porridge Robbery

A return to traditional oats could boost our microbiomes and our health

Rowan berries and moss, Tummel, photo by Rob Bruce

At this time of year, many of us switch to a traditional breakfast of porridge. But how many realise when they reach for the spurtle that Scotland’s oatmeal heritage has been stolen from us by big corporations to be sold back as a shadow of its former self?

Traditional porridge is not made with the rolled oats you see piled high in supermarkets, mockingly called “Scottish Porridge Oats”. You would be disqualified from the world porridge championship if you used that stuff. My Aberdeen-born mother would make a disgusted face if offered it. Traditional porridge is made with oatmeal.

Rolled oats are not the worst thing in the world to eat - we now know that fibre is vital to protect the body’s blood-brain barrier yet only 6% of Scots eat enough of it, the lowest in the UK. This is emerging as a serious risk factor for Alzheimer’s. Rolled oats are better than a bacon buttie in this respect - but they steal away many of the nutritional benefits that the heritage version offers.

Let us not forget the other hero of the Scots kitchen - what the writer HV Morton called “the porridge of the evening”. A thick soup of dried peas, pulses and barley, boiled up with vegetables, herbs, bone stock and scraps of meat, it provides not just plenty of fibre but most of the nutrition the human body needs. It was sad to see in a report in the Sunday Post at the weekend that Scotland’s 16 to 24-year-olds eschew this traditional fare in favour of processed meat, consuming more burgers and chicken nuggets than any other age group. They seee a lot of ads for processed food - nobody advertises home made broth or oatmeal.

Oat ‘flakes’ are not traditional - they are UPF

My friend Andrew Whitley of ‘Scotland the Bread’, which is trying to popularise the making of nutritious bread and other food, knows his oats. He explained the downside of the pursuit of ‘convenience’: “Industrial production of porridge oats by making a slurry of refined fibre-poor oatmeal and then squeezing it through hot rollers to re-create ‘flakes’ is an example of the theft of vitality - nutrients plus biological relationships - that characterises all ultra-processed food.”  

Whitely said the traditional way of making porridge would have been to soak meal overnight, perhaps with live cultures, probably in the embers of the fire which would have added an element of fermentation. Fermentation we now know has a powerful effect on the microbiome. It was this diet which led to the famous exchange which is supposed to have taken place between the Victorian travellers Boswell and Johnson on their tour of Scotland.

The Englishman remarked that in his country they fed oats to horses, but in Scotland they were fed to men. Boswell replied unphased - “But what horses, and what men!”

Sowing his wild oats

Most of the oats we eat today are far inferior to what Hieland crofters used in the past. Scotland used to have many different varieties adapted to the growing conditions  - you can still sometimes spot them in hedgerows. Andrew is now literally sowing his wild oats on the Scotland the Bread plot in Fife.  He is currently testing ‘Sir Douglas Haig’, ‘Storm King’ and the ‘Potato Oat’ - but would like to expand the operation.

Whitely explained the process that goes into making the debased porridge oats.  “To make rolled oats, the dehulled oat kernel or ‘groat’ is passed through rollers to flatten it. It then undergoes ’stabilisation’.  This is needed to neutralise the naturally-occurring enzyme in oats that, once the grain is broken by being milled or flattened, oxidises the fairly high level of fat in the oat and thus turns it rancid (like butter going off). 

“Traditionally, this enzyme was controlled by the process of ‘kilning’ the whole oats (i.e. with their outer husks or hulls on) over a fire fuelled by the husks of previous batches in a nice example of waste reduction/circularity/renewable energy use. Kilning would do two things – dry the (indigestible) husks which would then come away more easily in the first pass through the mill stones, and, ’toast’ the oats, enormously improving their flavour as well as giving them a non-rancid ’sporran-life’ of many months.

“Modern industrial ’stabilisation’ of oats is done using steam in a continuous flow process: the offending enzyme is denatured above 80°C, so steam is a taste-neutral (albeit energy-using) way of achieving the desired result. There's no toasty flavour, though.

“Porridge oats are an example of over-processing that appeals to a perceived demand for fibrelessness and speed of cooking. It’s an instant, ‘pot-noodle’ approach (low price and convenience) in which the marketed benefits mask the damage done to both personal health and (lack of fibre etc) and any sense of culinary agency.”

“How difficult was it for Scottish home cooks to set a bowl of wholegrain oatmeal to soak (ideally in some whey or fermented milk) overnight, ready to cook up in the morning? That overnight soak was (we now understand) a crucial fermentation step that rendered the oat bran (fibre) both more digestible in the sense of making its mineral content more bioaccessible to human guts, and more nutritious in the sense of releasing phenolic compounds (short chain fatty acids among them) that support microbiome diversity as well as gut-brain signalling. These are the same order of benefits that a South Indian cook will access from freshly-milled (to avoid rancidity as with oats) millet (bajra) or rice etc that is soaked overnight in fermented milk to be made into idlis in the morning. Overnight temperatures being a bit warmer in India than Scotland, the degree of healthy fermentation might be different. But my guess is that the Scottish cook would leave the bowl with the soaking oatmeal near to the stove (or peat embers) because that made nicer (and quicker!) porridge in the morning.”

If you look at healthy food blogs, you can see many ways of including that fermentation step in overnight oats. Using groats, the whole grain, which you can buy from a healthfood store, you might bring them to the boil in a Dutch oven, add lemon juice or yoghurt and then wrap the pan in a towel to keep it warm until morning. Don’t put them in the fridge.

Let’s reclaim our spirit along with our spurtles and stop accepting this nutrition robbery

I have actually complained a couple of times in supermarkets - Sainsbury’s is a particular offender - about the availability of just one kind of overprocessed oats, marked insultingly “Scottish Porridge Oats” when it is nothing of the kind. At least in the US, every supermarket sells pinhead oatmeal - although they usually label it “Irish oatmeal”.

As the nights draw in, let us resist this dilution of our culinary heritage, reclaiming our spirit as well as our spurtles. Keep the cold out and the doctor away this winter with porridge and broth. Here HV Morton reflects on Scotland’s greatest culinary art, soup making. 

“Scotland is the best place in the world to take an appetite. France, with its messy mysteries and its pretentious fragments, is all very well for that dreadful creature with a bashful interior who has to be led gently to his food, but if a man has an honest hunger sharpened by open air he will satisfy it with less risk to his mechanism more speedily in a Scottish kitchen than anywhere else.

“I could live on Scotch broth and Cockaleekie for ever! These supreme soups, the absolute monarchs of the stock-pot, are unparalleled elsewhere in the world. They are the food of the gods, not anaemic gods who sit in clouds on Ida, but hairy gods who tramp the heather with swords and howl from hill to hill. These soups appeal not only to my taste but also to my sense of colour and my love of variety. They are like a great orchestra engaged in perfect symphony. If a man encounters nothing in Scotland but broth—that porridge of the evening—thick with peas, barley, leeks, carrots, and almost everything that was in the kitchen at the time, he has not travelled in vain. He can return to his own land with the boast that he has met real soup."

Porridge eaters, on the Liathach pinnacles, photo Rob Bruce