Delicious and Nutritious

Sue Lawrence provides some more Scottish recipes, this time starring the humble oat.

A Scottish farmer, David Henderson, who died in 1998 aged 109 swore by a diet of porridge, prunes and an improbable mixture of gin and cattle salts. I like to think it was the porridge that encouraged longevity, not the gin – or even cattle salts.

In rural areas, there was something called the ‘porridge drawer,' a prime example of Scottish thrift.

Vast pots of porridge would be cooked, then poured directly into the drawer in the kitchen dresser (called a ‘kist' in the north-east of Scotland). It was allowed to cool and become solid, then cut into sections and taken onto the hills, as sustenance for the hard day's work. In the evening, slices called calders were cut off and fried then served with eggs or fish.

Bill McConachie, one of the engineers at Grampian Oats recalls the cold porridge in the drawer in his kitchen being cut and eaten for anything from one week to 10 days. Hebridean fisherman Dods Macfarlane remembers older folk in the north of Lewis telling him of a similar tradition, originating in dire necessity, since, apart from porridge, there was very little else to eat and so the morning's pan would be made to last longer than breakfast.

As a Scot, I was brought up on oats. There were oatcakes, flapjacks, bannocks and of course porridge. Soups and stews were thickened with oatmeal; apple crumbles topped with oatflakes; skirlie, made from toasted oats and onion, used to stuff chicken or served with mince. With the increasing awareness nowadays of the valuab...

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• By : Sue Lawrence
• In : Food
• Issue : 40
• Page : 48
• Words : 1,009