Porridge is so old it has turned up inside 5,000-year-old bog bodies
Neolithic people preserved in the bogs of Central Europe and Scandinavia died with oat porridge in their stomachs. Boiling crushed grain in water or milk is one of humanity's most universal meals, from Italian polenta and Chinese congee to the millet porridge that feeds much of the Sahel.
The basic recipe is simple: take a starchy plant, usually a grain, grind or chop it, and soak, poach or boil it in liquid until it thickens into something between a soup and a solid. Almost any grain works, including rice, barley, buckwheat and triticale, and the dish can be sweet with honey or jam or savoury with fish, meat or vegetables. In Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand the word means oats specifically; North Americans call the same thing oatmeal.
Maize porridges alone span continents. Southern Americans eat grits made from ground hominy with butter and pepper, while Romanians make mămăligă. Colonial Americans boiled cornmeal with milk into suppawn, better known as hasty pudding, and the fur-trading Voyageurs relied on rubaboo, dried maize and peas cooked with animal fat. The Māori of New Zealand make kānga pirau from fermented corn.
Millet has an equally wide reach. Foxtail millet porridge is a staple in northern China, pearl millet porridge is the core food of Niger and its neighbours, and the Ainu of northern Japan eat munchiro sayo. Ancient Romans had milium in aqua, cooked with goat's milk. At the thin end of the scale sits gruel, runny enough to drink.
Nutritionally, plain cooked oatmeal is mostly water, about 84 percent, with 71 calories per 100 grams and a useful share of manganese but little else. Research attention has focused on beta-glucan, a soluble fibre in oats: a 2014 review found that at least 3 grams a day lowered total and LDL cholesterol by 5 to 10 percent, with bigger drops in people starting higher. In 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration allowed labels to say that soluble fibre from whole oats may reduce heart disease risk, provided a serving supplies at least 0.75 grams.
Source: Porridge
