Culinary Meditations, One: Slow Oatmeal

I have always been interested in good, basic peasant food, so as I work harder to prevent further health-related crises, I've been thinking long and hard about more deliberate eating.

People seem more and more inclined to either obsess about food or to simply eat what's cheap or handy. Neither extreme requires thinking through what we eat, or considering what it all means. But since food is one of the few real basic needs (along with clothing and shelter), it's a significant part of what I go on and on about on Owl's Farm: the education of desire.

Seeking to educate my taste buds, I've embarked on a small program to spend time each week cooking and thinking. This morning I wanted something warm and filling to eat, so I decided to make some oatmeal. Sometime last year I found out that instant oatmeal is next to useless as a source of soluble fiber--the kind that helps regulate blood sugar, lower cholesterol, and provide other good things to one's body. After that I bought steel-cut Irish oats, cooked them up in fairly large quantities, and kept them in the fridge to nuke for breakfast. But not long ago, in one of my more nostalgic moods, I picked up some organically grown rolled oats, and these are what I retrieved from the pantry this morning.

In an effort to keep the weevils at bay, I had removed the oats from their package and put them in an air-tight container, but forgot to put the cooking instructions in with them. Since I don't have much of a memory for quantities and proportions, I went to my old copy of The Joy of Cooking to look up oatmeal and found that Rombauer had left oatmeal out of her instructions for cereal grains. But I used her quantities for course grains as a starting point, and began with four cups of water and a cup and a half of oats.

I got the water boiling while I poured a cup of coffee, and added a few grinds of sea salt (probably no more than a quarter teaspoon). When the water hit a rolling boil, I started slowly pouring in the oats, and watched them perform their acrobatic roll around the pot. I held the last half cup back for a few moments, thinking that perhaps these would be a little less "done" in the end, and add some crunch.

Once you get the oats all boiling together, you have to keep stirring them so they don't stick and/or boil over--but you also have to lower the heat a bit.

I kept stirring for about ten more minutes, turned off the heat, and left the gruel to sit. It was still a bit watery, but I was pretty sure that the remaining moisture would be absorbed if I left it alone long enough to read the funnies and enjoy the rest of my coffee.

The living room, where I read the paper in my comfy chair, is three rooms away from the kitchen, but the aroma of warm oats reached me within a couple of minutes, mingling with the coffee and sending me back to my home town, and winter mornings around my grandmother's kitchen table.

When I returned to the pot, the oats were ready to eat, so I ladled some into a bowl, put a dollop of olive oil/butter spread in the center, drizzled it all with about a teaspoon full of ginger syrup, and added a handful of blueberries.

I sat down and stirred the melting butter into the oats with the ginger and blueberries. I'm pretty sure I've never tasted oatmeal quite as good as this. Whether the brand of oats was particularly well-milled, or whether my method made them better, or whether just paying attention made the difference, they were quite simply the best I've ever had. The flavor was subtly oaty, there was indeed a bit of crunch, and the tiny bit of salt was all it needed to round out the flavor. I got a serving of fruit from the blueberries, and a smidgen of fat from the teaspoon of butter.

At a time in my life when my senses seem to be either dwindling or getting lazy, it was an enormous pleasure to enjoy something so simple so much.

I look forward to the next experiment, in hopes that this marks a way to invigorate my experience of the world. It's far too easy to get lost in the rigors of teaching, grading, and administrating, especially in winter when it's difficult to occupy oneself in the garden. Small pleasures seem to reap large rewards when approached thoughtfully--something that seems far too easy to forget, even when one has teetered on the brink of existence all too recently.

Mrs. Rudkin's Cookbook

One of the problems with having multiple blogs, even when they're focused on different topics, is that sometimes I'm not sure where to post something. This conundrum arose yesterday when I came across a wonderful book about which I wanted to make note--but couldn't choose the proper venue. This morning I decided to post it on both. This sounds a bit lazy, but since it's the product of a serendipitous occurrence and about the idea of home and place, maybe the idea isn't as silly as it seems even as I write.

The book in question is The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, and published by Atheneum in 1963. I found it in the "nostalgia" section of Half Price Books yesterday, where I'd gone to drown my sorrows after hearing about the resignation of a friend and colleague--the second in as many months--which left me feeling more than a little bereft. Beloved Spouse and I were on our way out when I noticed the rather Edward Gorey-ish spine of a book which, on first glance seemed to be another corporate promotional endeavor (some of which, like the Spice Islands Cookbook, also published in 1963, can be quite good)--but with amusing and well-crafted pictures scattered throughout. The dust jacket was missing, so what attracted me were the un-augmented images on the front (above) and back (below) covers.

Now, I'm as big a sucker for good illustration as I am for good cookbooks, so I said to myself, "What the hell; it's only ten bucks" and added it to my small pile of goodies.

When I got home, I started leafing through the book and discovered a treasure: a compendium of healthful recipes developed by the woman who had founded Pepperidge Farm (named for her own family's farm in Connecticut) and ended up serving on the board of Campbell Soup after she sold her company to them in 1961. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named her one of the century's fifty most powerful women. (Copies of the cookbook can be had from online used-book outlets like alibris for less than what I paid, but some may be the 1992 edition).

Margaret Fogarty Rudkin was born the same year as my Grandma Clarice, 1897, in New York. In 1937, when her son developed allergies that his doctor said could be addressed by feeding him bread made from whole grains, she began a journey that eventually led to the cookbook. 1963, when Rudkin published it, was the year after I returned from Taiwan and during which I lived with my grandmother, so the coincidence adds to my delight in finding the book when I did.

The illustrator, Erik Blegvad, is actually no stranger to my family. One of my children's favorite books growing up was Judith Viorst's The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (which I highly recommend to families for helping them deal with the death of a pet)--illustrated by none other than Mr. Blegvad.

During my recently aborted attempt to improve my typographic skills (I had to drop the class because midterm madness caught up with me), I had run across another book by Blegvad that's probably worth looking for: Types Best Remembered/Types Best Forgotten, published by Parsimony Press in 1994. But the cheapest edition I could find through alibris is $69. Guess I'll wait on that one.

At any rate, owning Rudkin's cookbook is really like having several books in one, because each chapter focuses on an entirely different topic: Childhood, Country Life, Pepperidge Farm, Cooking from Antique Cookbooks, and Ireland. Each features a chatty and informative introduction, and the "antique cookbooks" chapter offers modern versions of such goodies as a fifteenth-century pumpkin pie, although the original carries this warning: "Cassius, who was bothered by colic and stones, did not eat this. It is difficult to digest and nourishes badly." Rudkin's version is much more palatable (perhaps because she doesn't put in a half pound of sow's belly), and simple to make:

Preheat oven to 450.

Ingredients: (Plain pastry for a 9 inch single-crust pie.) 1.5 cups canned pumpkin, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 eggs, 1 c. milk, 1 c. cream.

Method: Line a 9-inch pie pan with pastry, making a high edge. Brush the pastry all over with egg white. Place in the refrigerator while preparing the filling. Mix together the pumpkin and the spices. Sift the brown sugar into the pumpkin and mix well. Beat the eggs and add them. The add the milk and cream and mix well. Pull out the shelf of the oven, set the prepared pie pan on the shelf and carefully pour the filling into the crust. Don't pour all onto one spot., but take a cupful at a time and spread the filling around to avoid breaking the crust. Filling the crust this way avoids spilling.

Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake 45 minutes more until the custard is set.

The idea of simple food, lovingly prepared is always welcome, but I think we can especially appreciate it in times when folks no longer eat together all that often, and when grandmothers and their grandchildren can be separated by continents. My memories of times in my grandmother's kitchen come flooding back when I find a book like this, grounded in a similar view of the world and a similar notion of nurturing. My fondest wish is that more people come back to the practice of spending time cooking together as gas gets more expensive and makes folks less likely to run out to the Olive Garden for a family meal. There is absolutely nothing like a home-made pumpkin pie to make us feel secure and comfy--and nothing like a well-illustrated, well-written cookbook to help us recall the relationship between food and home.