Porridge and the Spurtle: Oats, Salt and the Golden Spurtle

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The importance of oats in the Scottish diet is well documented. Customs such as stirring clockwise, eating porridge standing up and the porridge drawer are folklore. The first two were recorded as living practice by the folklorist F. Marian McNeill in The Scots Kitchen (1929), and the habit of calling porridge "they" is in Jamieson's dictionary of Scots, but none of them can be traced to a single origin. The porridge drawer has no early source at all.

Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) supplies the natural history of oats, the grades of oatmeal (adapted from Catherine Brown's Scottish Cookery, 1985), and entries on porridge, brose, gruel, sowans and hasty pudding. Several of its gruel and sowans entries are signed by the food historian Laura Mason. It repeats some of the same customs McNeill recorded, including the porridge drawer, without citing an earlier source, so its repetition is not treated as independent proof.

The grain of Scotland

established Oats tolerate cool, wet summers and poorer soils better than wheat, which made them the main grain across much of Scotland. Oatmeal was ground at local mills and stored in a girnal, or meal chest. It was eaten as porridge, as brose, made by pouring boiling water over raw oatmeal, as oatcakes and bannocks, and in dishes such as skirlie and haggis. Farm servants were often paid partly in oatmeal.

shared How early oats took first place is less certain than the legend suggests. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), argues that bere, the old Scottish barley, was the more widely grown grain, especially in the Highlands, until about the end of the seventeenth century, and that "bere broth and bere bannocks" fed townsfolk and peasants alike until then. She thinks the poorest Scots in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries broke their fast with bere porridge or with brose of oatmeal and water. On her account oats rose to dominance only in the eighteenth century, helped by better seed (the old grey oat had been called "the worst and least productive grain in Europe" in 1808), by oatmeal's keeping qualities, and perhaps by national pride after the Union, when eating oats set Scots apart from wheat-eating England. She calls the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "the golden age of the oat". The broad point, that bere was a major food grain before oats overtook it, fits the evidence for bere in Orkney and the north; how far it held in the Lowlands is open.

established Hope collects the evidence of oatmeal as food, wage and currency. When East Lothian farmers raised money to buy grain for the starving during the famines of the late eighteenth century, oats had risen so far in price that they had to buy barley, wheat and peasemeal instead, but they still bought enough oatmeal for one meal a day for the children, to whom, the report said, "from their having tasted scarce any other food for breakfast from their infancy, it was indispensable". Boys going to town to study or serve an apprenticeship took their own bag of meal: in 1781 Robert Burns, working for a flax-dresser in Irvine, ended a letter to his parents, "My meal is nearly out, but I am going to borrow till I get more." Farm workers were still paid partly in meal, pease and barley in many districts late in the nineteenth century, schoolmasters' pay and ministers' stipends were topped up with meal, and Highland fishermen bartered their catch for it.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929), records that the girnal was packed anew after every harvest, and that well-packed meal was thought to improve with keeping for a year or more. She tells of poor students who studied in garrets beside a sack of oatmeal, and links the universities' Mealy Monday holiday to the breaks that once let them walk home to refill the sack. Hope dates the end of Meal Monday, the January holiday on which classes were suspended so that students could go home for more meal, to the late 1950s. In the 1963 edition she blamed mass milling for the loss of the kiln-dried flavour of the local mill's meal, and so for children who no longer enjoyed their porridge.

The oat itself

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains why Scotland and oats suit each other. The oat (Avena sativa) grows well in moist, temperate to cool climates and thrives where wheat or barley would fail. It was a late arrival in farming. Wild oats shed their grains as soon as they ripen, which helps a weed but not a farmer, and the first traces of cultivation, from strains that held their seed, date from about 1000 BC in central Europe. The Greeks and Romans thought oats coarse and barbarian and the Romans used them mainly as fodder, but they did foster oat growing in Britain. Oats became the principal cereal of Wales and, even more, of Scotland. An early nineteenth-century survey found that the Welsh ate more oats than all other cereals combined, and that ordinary Scots ate almost no other grain.

established Nutritionally, the Companion notes, oats are among the best cereals: as much protein as fine bread wheat and more fat than any other common grain. They lack gluten, so they make poor raised bread, which is why oats went into porridge, brose and oatcakes rather than loaves. Scottish emigrants took oats to America, where they were first grown in Massachusetts in 1602.

established The Companion reproduces Catherine Brown's guide to oatmeal grades. Pinhead, the kernel cut in two, is used for haggis and oatmeal loaves. Rough is for porridge or brose. Medium rough, also called coarse medium, is what butchers use for mealie puddings. Medium and fine are the most popular, for porridge, brose, skirlie and baking. Super-fine goes into baking and oatcakes. Rolled oats, or oatflakes, were developed in America by the Quaker Oat Company in 1877 by steaming and rolling pinhead meal. They cook faster, but Brown notes that the heat treatment costs some flavour and nutrients, as with instant oat porridges. Jumbo oatflakes are rolled from the whole oat.

Porridge at the breakfast table

established Period sources gathered by Annette Hope show who ate porridge and how much. In the late eighteenth century Sir John Sinclair calculated that a ploughman's breakfast was "2 lbs of porridge, containing 10 oz. of oatmeal, 30 oz. of water, and 1 lb. of milk", and blamed it for flatulence and indigestion. By about 1800, she writes, porridge or brose was the normal breakfast of farmers and farm workers everywhere except the West Highlands, where potatoes were gaining ground. The French geologist Faujas de Saint-Fond found peasants on Mull in 1784 eating potatoes and milk, with some oatmeal as porridge or cakes, while at Maclean of Torluisk's table breakfast included "a sort of pap, of oatmeal and water", each spoonful "plunged alternatively into cream". The gentry ate porridge too: Sir Walter Scott, who rose at five to write, came to the family breakfast for porridge and cream with salmon, ham, cold sheep's head and oatcakes.

established Oats and horses rose and fell together. Hope gives the Scottish oat acreage as 1,004,535 acres in 1879, against 278,584 under barley and 76,613 under wheat, with a second peak of 1,010,895 acres in 1943. By 1986 oats and mixed grain covered only 28,300 hectares (about 70,000 acres). The draught horses, up to 140,000 on Scottish farms at one time, ate much of the crop. Horsemen rose at about 5.30, fed and groomed their horses, and only then ate their own breakfast: porridge if they lived in the farmhouse or a married cottage, brose if they fended for themselves in the bothy.

The retreat of oatmeal

established In "The Cotter's Saturday Night", published in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, Robert Burns called porridge "chief of Scotia's food". The food historian Roy Campbell later summed up what followed as "the rejection of oatmeal" as the leading item of the Scottish diet, a change he dated between the 1790s and 1914. The historian Derek Oddy, in a 1997 paper published in Order and Disorder (2000), tests that claim against family budgets. In the early 1840s oatmeal and potatoes were the mainstay almost everywhere, with oatmeal universal in the north-east and scarcer in the Hebrides, where the potato ruled. Change came first through men: in an 1868–69 report on farm labourers' diets, a field worker at Newton Stewart ate a wheat loaf and cheese for dinner while his family had tea and oatcake, and porridge and milk at other meals. In Scotland bread had higher status than the old foods, so men took it up first.

shared By the early 1900s town families had largely swapped oatmeal for bread, butter, jam and tea, but in the country it held on. A 1904 Argyll farm menu still began and ended the day with porridge. The Carnegie Survey of 1937 found rural families in the north-east eating up to 2 lb (0.9 kg) of oatmeal and oatcakes per head per week, while in the Fife coalfield and in Dundee and Edinburgh it had almost disappeared. The survey team linked the survival of the old diet of oatmeal, potatoes and milk in the north-east to the payment of farm workers partly in kind. Oddy concludes that Campbell overstated the decline in nutrition: across 1900–39 Scottish families on average held or slightly improved their energy, protein and mineral intakes. But families who gave up oatmeal and milk for bread without adding other foods ended up with a restricted diet. The historian John Burnett, in a paper in the same volume, records that when milk prices rose in Glasgow in 1919–20, nurses found the poorest families had given up porridge made with milk.

established Hope adds earlier town evidence. In nineteenth-century towns, she writes, bread, margarine and tea replaced the porridge or brose and milk of the countryside, and where porridge was still eaten in Glasgow a shortage of milk led many to eat it with treacle and water instead. A Dundee Social Union report of 1905 found that most families with young children breakfasted on porridge and milk, then tea and bread and butter, but that where both parents worked the family ate only bread and tea. In Lochaber as late as 1914 a typical country breakfast was still porridge and milk, tea, oatcakes, scones, eggs and bacon or fish.

Johnson's jibe

established In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson defined oats as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people". The definition reflected English prejudices about Scotland.

traditional A later story says a Scot retorted, "Yes, and where else will you see such horses, and such men?" The retort is often attributed to Lord Elibank, but the evidence is anecdotal.

established The Oxford Companion to Food adds that Johnson later admitted to Boswell, "I meant to vex them", meaning the Scots. It also judges the definition accurate, however unkindly meant: in Scotland the ordinary people really did live on oats.

Making porridge

established Traditional Scottish porridge is made by sprinkling oatmeal into boiling water, stirring to prevent lumps, and simmering, with salt added. It was often eaten with milk or buttermilk in a separate bowl, each spoonful dipped in the cold milk. Rolled oats, flattened by steaming and rolling, became popular after American companies, notably Quaker, marketed them from the 1870s onward, and they cook more quickly.

established McNeill's "one and only method" adds the details cooks argued over. The meal falls "in a steady rain from the left hand" into boiling water while the right hand stirs. Salt goes in only after ten minutes, because she held that early salt hardens the meal and stops it swelling, but porridge is never cooked without it. It was served in cold porringers with a separate bowl of cream, milk or buttermilk. She advises keeping a pot, the goblet, for porridge alone; the cast-iron goblets of the Carron works at Falkirk were the standard. The traditional bowl was of birch and the spoon of horn, which does not heat up as metal does. Porter, small beer and skeachan, a treacle ale, were old accompaniments, and thin drinking-sowans stood in when milk was scarce.

established The Oxford Companion to Food gives McNeill's method as the classic one and adds a little science and comparison. The porridge returns to the boil and simmers for 20 to 30 minutes, during which the starch in the oats gelatinises, giving soft but distinct grains in a thick, creamy mixture. Regional variants used buttermilk or whey instead of water. Horn spoons were preferred because they stayed cool, and dipping each spoonful in cold milk, cream or buttermilk was a habit shared with Breton peasants eating their buckwheat bouillie. The Companion says McNeill's quotations show that Scots did sometimes sweeten porridge, but mostly for children; it is the English who treat sugar as normal, and in Yorkshire it was sweetened with treacle wherever possible.

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), adds that many eighteenth-century Scots took ale or porter with their porridge, and that some families let children have honey or syrup. She prefers pinhead meal soaked overnight, cooked until, in a saying she quotes, it "says 'Gargunnock and Perth'", and poured into cold plates to set. She records an old man's memory of his mother on Skye adding a spoonful or two of whisky to the bowls of children facing a three-mile walk to school on winter mornings.

Porridge is not only Scottish

established The Companion is blunt on this point. Porridge descends from pottage, a thoroughly English institution, and was once part of the English labourer's diet. In eighteenth-century Leeds, weavers called it "water pudding" and ate it for breakfast and supper. The English then forgot, and, buying oats in cartons decorated with a kilted Scotsman, came to see porridge as a Scottish food. The Scottish distinction is how long and how universally the habit lasted, not its invention.

established In the wider sense, porridge is any cooked mush of grain or pulses: frumenty from wheat, tsampa from barley, polenta from maize, congee from rice. Barley porridge, the Companion notes, is more delicate than oatmeal porridge, to the point of being rather insipid, and was usually made with milk.

The spurtle

established The spurtle is a wooden rod, often with a thistle-shaped top, used to stir porridge without forming lumps. It is a Scottish kitchen tool, and a flat-bladed version was once used for turning oatcakes. McNeill records other names for the stirring stick: theevil in some districts and gruel-tree in Shetland. Her oatcake kit names the spurtle for mixing and a separate heart-shaped iron spathe for lifting cakes onto the girdle.

traditional Folklore says porridge should be stirred clockwise with the right hand, to avoid inviting the Devil. McNeill gives a milder reason: stirring sunwise, the Gaelic deiseal, was lucky and the opposite, widdershins, unlucky, a belief she says was still held in parts of the Highlands for kneading bannocks, stirring kail and passing a glass. She adds, drily, that the right-hand turn is also more convenient. Another story says families poured leftover porridge into a kitchen drawer to set, then cut it into slices to carry to work. That one is widely told but undocumented. The Oxford Companion to Food repeats it, describing porridge poured into a mould, "for instance, a drawer in the sideboard", and sliced as rations for a day's work away from home. The practice of setting and slicing porridge is plausible, since cooked oatmeal sets firm, but the Companion gives no source for the drawer. Annette Hope's A Caledonian Feast (1987) tells it as "it is said" of shepherds, who made porridge once a week and cut a slice or two each day, and adds that country people who moved to Glasgow's factories in the nineteenth century kept the habit. She too gives no source.

established Two other customs are better attested. Jamieson's dictionary of Scots, quoted by McNeill, shows porridge treated as plural: "I dinna like them; they're unco wersh" (very insipid). McNeill also records eating porridge standing as "the old custom", citing a friend slapped by her Highland nurse for not "standing up to them", and General Sir Ian Hamilton's memory of children judging guests who sat down to porridge, or worse, took sugar. She offered no opinion on why the custom arose. Hope lists the explanations in circulation, half in jest: to stay alert against surprise attack, or because, as the proverb has it, "a stauning sack fills the fu'est".

Old names and relatives

established Porridge had many regional names and cousins. McNeill gives brochan as the usual Highland word for porridge or gruel, from the Gaelic; Martin Martin had used it of Skye in 1703. Meal-and-milk, milk-meat or, in Shetland, milgruel was porridge made with milk. Bluthrie (Ettrick and Forfarshire) was thin porridge; bleirie or lewands (Lanarkshire and Clydesdale) was oatmeal boiled in buttermilk with butter; whey-whullions was the breakfast leftovers beaten into whey with fresh meal; and tartan-purry was thin porridge made with the water kail had been boiled in. Crowdie, raw meal stirred with water or buttermilk, was once so usual at the start of the day that Burns and Scott use "crowdie-time" for breakfast-time.

established The Oxford Companion to Food sorts the family by method. Brose differs from porridge in that the meal is not cooked: boiling water or milk is poured over it, with salt and butter. It could be made from barley meal or peasemeal as well as oatmeal, and McNeill records beggars mixing whatever meals they had been given. Green brose used young nettle tops or spring onions; kail brose had meat stock poured over the meal with kale; neep brose was made with swede. Atholl brose, of oatmeal, water, honey and whisky, carries a legend that a Duke of Atholl filled his enemies' well with it in 1475 and captured them drunk; the Companion gives it as legend.

established Gruel is a thinner porridge of finely ground oatmeal, soaked and cooked, with the solids strained out, so that it sets to a jelly when cold. The name comes from French gruau, finely ground flour. It was invalid food across Britain, and the Companion's entry, by Laura Mason, notes that Scots thought it good for coughs and colds.

established Sowans, also signed by Laura Mason, is the oddest of the group. The inner husks of the oat grain, the "sids", were soaked in lukewarm water for about a week until slightly sour, then squeezed and discarded. The liquid stood for two days until a starchy sediment settled; that sediment was the sowans, cooked with salt and water until thick and creamy and eaten like porridge, or thinned as a drink. Wales had the same dish as sucan and llymru, which became the English "flummery". McNeill tells of a Scottish soldier at Mafeking in the Boer War who kept the garrison going with sowans made from the horses' feed.

established Hasty pudding was, in England, a quick porridge of flour and milk. The Companion notes that in the far north of England and in Scotland, at least as early as the eighteenth century, the name came to mean a plain porridge of oats and barley, made with water as often as milk.

From oatmeal to cornmeal

shared The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed (1989), argues that 18th-century emigrants from Scotland, Ulster and northern England kept their porridge habit in the American backcountry but changed the grain. Oats gave way to maize, so oatmeal mush became cornmeal mush, which he equates with "grits"; in his words, "the texture of the dish remained the same". He quotes travellers who noted the settlers' taste for "mush boiled in milk", and a northern English writer, John Gough, who said border breakfasts consisted "chiefly of porridge … boiled in milk". He also reports that the settlers ate only two meals a day, a plain breakfast and a large meal in mid-afternoon, which he calls a North British custom.

shared The argument is plausible but loose. Maize porridge was a Native American food long before Europeans arrived, and grits come from that tradition as well as from British habit. Much of Fischer's British evidence is from Cumberland and Westmorland rather than Scotland, and his American evidence comes largely from hostile visitors such as the Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason. The point worth keeping is that settlers raised on boiled oatmeal took readily to boiled cornmeal.

The Golden Spurtle

established Since 1994 the village of Carrbridge in Strathspey has hosted the World Porridge Making Championship each October, with competitors from around the world. The traditional category requires porridge made only with oatmeal, water and salt; a speciality category allows other ingredients. The winner receives the Golden Spurtle.

• Johnson said oats in Scotland "support the people".
• A spurtle is a wooden porridge stirrer.
• Folklore says porridge should be stirred clockwise.
• Traditional porridge uses salt, not sugar.
• Carrbridge hosts the Golden Spurtle championship.
• In colonial America, emigrants from Scotland and Ulster swapped oatmeal porridge for cornmeal mush.
• In Victorian Scotland bread was a higher-status food than oatmeal, so working men often ate wheat bread while their wives and children ate porridge.
• As late as 1937, rural families in north-east Scotland ate up to 2 lb of oatmeal and oatcakes per head each week.
• One Anglican visitor to the Carolina backcountry in the 1760s complained that the settlers "eat twice a day only" (as quoted by Fischer).
• Johnson mocked oats in his dictionary, yet Boswell records him admitting, on a boat to Mull in 1773, that he had been fond of dry oatmeal as a boy.
• Sir Walter Scott offered to send his grandson meal from Abbotsford, saying it would agree with him better than "the southern food of horses" (as quoted by McNeill).
• McNeill recalls a nurse who drew a golden dromedary in syrup on the porridge to coax reluctant children.
• Johnson later told Boswell of his oats definition, "I meant to vex them".
• Eighteenth-century Leeds weavers ate porridge twice a day and called it "water pudding".
• Rolled oats were developed by the Quaker Oat Company in 1877.

• Disputed: Stirring clockwise and the porridge drawer. F. Marian McNeill recorded the sunwise stirring belief as living practice in her own day, but its origin is unknown. The story of setting porridge in a drawer and slicing it has no early source; The Oxford Companion to Food and Annette Hope repeat it without one.
• Myth: Johnson's definition said oats were food for horses in England and for men in Scotland. His words were "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people". The retort "and where else will you see such horses, and such men?" is often attributed to Lord Elibank, but the evidence is anecdotal.
• Disputed: Oats as Scotland's main grain through the Middle Ages. Annette Hope argues that bere, the old Scottish barley, was more widely grown until about the end of the seventeenth century, and that oats rose to dominance in the eighteenth.
• Myth: Oatmeal had vanished from the Scottish diet by 1914. Town families had largely switched to bread, butter, jam and tea by the early 1900s, but in the rural north-east oatmeal remained a major food into the late 1930s.
• Myth: Grits are a Scottish dish. Maize porridge was a Native American food long before Europeans arrived. David Hackett Fischer's link to oatmeal is an argument about settlers' habit, not about origin.
• Myth: Porridge is a Scottish invention. It descends from English pottage and was eaten by English labourers too, such as the Leeds weavers who called it "water pudding". Scotland kept the habit longest and most widely.
• Myth: Atholl brose was invented in 1475 to capture an enemy by filling his well. The Oxford Companion to Food gives this as legend.