A Bowl of Porridge
Breakfast cereal is terrible stuff. We eat it because for some strange reason we think it’s good for us, because it’s cheap and goes down easily, and, mostly, because it’s what everybody else eats for breakfast. Not me, no more. Apart with a very brief flirtation with granola sometime in the sixties, I haven’t touched a bowl of it since childhood. But give me good old fashioned oat meal. It has aroma, taste, a sense of substance, the presence of the actual grain itself. Open a bag of oatmeal and you’ll find something the hand can get a hold of, real chunks and bits of grain, not the processed silt that pours from all those other boxes.
People who say they don’t like oatmeal have probably never tasted it. Most of what passes for oatmeal is made from rolled oats, at best, or “instant” oats, mixed up, right in the bowl, yielding a substance as much like real oatmeal as instant coffee resembles the genuine brew. An honest batch of oatmeal must simmer in the pot for at least a half hour. That gentle cooking brings out its nutty taste, its velvety aroma, a texture the mouth can linger over, and a warmth that glows in the stomach until lunchtime. And, best of all, oatmeal is company. Sit down with a bowl of rice crispys and there’s nothing to do with it but eat it. But oatmeal has depth. The spoon slips down and lifts up memories.
Some are our own and other not. Because breakfast is our most conservative meal, many favorite morning foods reach further back into the past than anything else we set on the table. A child reading an old story book feels suddenly at home with those strange folk of yesterday when they sit down to hot buttered toast or a plate of ham and eggs. And this sense of connection endures even when the story itself fades away.
Take Olive Twist. If you remember anything at all about that novel, you remember “Please, sir, I want some more”….. and the sudden silence in a roomful of starved boys, bowls polished clean, fingers licked for any bits of gruel (porridge) that might have ended up on them. The empty porridge bowl is all the more powerful an image because oatmeal is at once so cheap and so comforting that grudging it becomes a genuine act of cruelty. If corn flakes had existed then, they would have had no analogous resonance to give the novelist: there simply is no warmth or comfort in them.