Oats in Scotland

Long before the Scots, Neolithic farmers cultivated oats and prepared porridge. Porridges were an easy way to cook the grains. The grain only had to be cracked, not completely ground into flour. Evidence of these porridges suggests it was a very dense food.

Oatmeal is widely identified with Scottish food and indeed is its culinary leit‐motiv for the many tourists who visit a proud land. Scotland is thought to be where the trend of eating oat porridge for breakfast began.

Oatcakes are by many considered the national bread of Scotland. They are made almost entirely of oats. They were even baked by the Romans in Scotland in the 1st century. In the 14th century Scottish soldiers carried a metal plate and a sack of oatmeal. They would heat the plate over the fire, moisten a bit of oatmeal and make a cake.

Until late in the 19th century, oats was a basic food mainly in Scotland and Wales, in other parts of the world, the majority of crops produced were fed to animals. In Samuel Johnson's dictionary, oats were defined as “eaten by people in Scotland, but fit only for horses in England”.

Scottish settlers were credited with bringing oatmeal to North America. During the early nineteenth century, most oatmeal was imported from Scotland and sold primarily in pharmacies. U.S. cookbooks from that era either omitted oatmeal recipes or suggested it as a food for the infirm.
Oats in Scotland

Oat Cuisine

Oat Cuisine
When an innovative and enterprising immigrant Ohio miller named Ferdinand Schumacher began promoting his new steel-cut as a nutritious cereal in the 1860s, editorial writers and cartoonists of the day scoffed, insinuating that oats-eaters robbed horses and would develop the whinnies.

The Scots, whose taste for oats was already known, were dismissed as being too cheap or too poor to consume anything else.

Nevertheless, Schumacher’s steel-cut oats, his even more convenient rolled oats began catching on as breakfast fare, probably because they were economical and satisfying as well as relatively easy to prepare.

(Schumacher eventually became one of the founders of what is now the Quaker Oats Company.)

By 1881, oats had also made their way into baked goods: a book of recipes for commercial bakers called The Complete Bread, Cake and Cracker Baker contained recipe for oats meal muffins, puffs and rolls and a rolled oatmeal-molasses cookie called “oatmeal Snacks” or “Scotch Perkins.”
Presumably Scottish in origin - ginger bread cookies called “parkins” do turn up in old British cookbooks - these snaps may well have been the first oatmeal cookies baked in America.

Only eight years later rolled oatmeal cookies called “Oatmeal Biscuits” debuted in a work for home cooks, Mrs. Clarke’s Cookery Book.

The earliest oatmeal-raisin drip cookie I’ve come across appeared in the Capital City Cook Book, a Madison, Wisconsin, church cookbook published in 1906.

Sometime after 1910, oatmeal cookies edged further into America mainstream when Quaker Oats first put an oatmeal cookie recipe on its box.

While no one paid particular attention then, the public did notice - and vigorously complained - when the company stopped putting oatmeal cookie recipes on its containers in the early 1950s.

The recipes immediate were reinstated, an various oatmeal cookies have been featured in Quaker Oats boxes ever since.

Now, the oatmeal cookie is second in popularity in America only to the chocolate chip.
Oat Cuisine