Scottish universities once gave students a holiday to fetch more oats
Oats cope with cold, damp weather far better than wheat, so they became Scotland's staple grain. The country's ancient universities even kept Meal Monday, a break for students to go home to the farm and restock. Samuel Johnson sneered that oats fed horses in England and people in Scotland.
Oatmeal starts with oat grains knocked out of their husks, then heated and cooled to stabilise the groat inside. From there it can be milled to fine, medium or coarse meal, chopped into pinhead or steel-cut pieces, or steamed and pressed flat into rolled oats. Thick old-fashioned flakes use whole groats; quick and instant oats are cut smaller and rolled thinner, so they cook faster.
Johnson's dictionary jibe drew a famous comeback. According to Walter Scott, as recorded by Boswell, Lord Elibank asked where else one could find such horses and such men. Scottish kitchens use oatmeal for brose made with butter or cream, oatcakes and bannocks, skirlie, Highland black pudding and a Hebridean white pudding eaten at breakfast. In Ireland the equivalent was stirabout, oatmeal stirred into boiling water or milk. Because it was cheap and easy in bulk, it fed prisons, convents and workhouses; in 1863 workhouse children each got 5 ounces of meal for breakfast, half oats and half cornmeal.
The grain travels widely. Across the Netherlands, the Nordic and Baltic countries and Russia, oat porridge is a traditional breakfast, often with cinnamon, raisins or nuts, though rye and barley porridges were more common in parts of the region during the Middle Ages. Staffordshire makes a plate-sized yeasted oatcake for the full English breakfast, and in Nigeria a winter oat dish called zimbuleh is sweetened with honey and cardamom.
Nutritionally, cooked plain oatmeal is mostly water: 84 percent, with 12 percent carbohydrate and about 71 Calories per 100 grams, plus a useful share of manganese. In 1997 the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that oat bran or whole rolled oats, alongside a low-fat diet, can lower heart-disease risk because oat beta-glucan reduces blood cholesterol, and European regulators reached a similar view in 2010. A 2023 review also linked eating oats to lower blood pressure.
Source: Oatmeal
