Old Manx Recipes - or 101 uses for oatmeal.

[curiouswombat]

I have been doing some historic research on the internet, and on one of my favourite sites I found a book of collected traditional Manx Recipes, published in 1890something. This appears to have been a very early version of the charity recipe books we see nowadays - the recipes were collected from local women and a local doctor and the book was sold for the benefit of the parishioners of the church in Peel.

It doesn't say a lot for the diet of the Manx in the nineteenth century that the first half dozen recipes were all for porridge, and the next dozen or so were for other ways of cooking oatmeal which were basically porridge made with stock as a savoury meal 'good for working men', and then there were recipes for porridge made with toasted oatmeal and meat stock, for very special occasions!

More than half the recipes seemed to include oatmeal in one form or another - and many of the rest of them were for the thing I remember being told was the horror of my Grandfather's youth - Binjean - milk warmed and set with rennet. The only addition, if you were lucky, was a sprinkle of sugar.

There were at least two recipes which basically said 'split a barley loaf, fill it with butter and a boiled herring' - and the special version, where you filled it with a herring and a boiled potato.

There was a recipe for gingerbread - this was probably the fanciest thing in it, and also a recipe for haggis - which it said was a very traditional manx dish! This of course contained a lot of oatmeal, but there was also a haggis variation containing potato instead - that would probably have had Rabby Burns turning in his grave!

So had I been born 100 years earlier than I was, I would have lived on oatmeal porridge, barley bread, herrings, potatoes, and milk. I only noticed any vegetable other than onion or potato in one recipe - it had a turnip in it. I wonder whether I would have been more or less healthy?

Comments

[maevebran.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Oats in that many recipes is uh . . . I don't know what. Sounds like a very sturdy diet. Thanks for sharing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be exciting, that's for sure! I can't imagine life without curry, or chocolate....or coffee - meep, imagine no coffee!

[elsaf]

Your cholesterol would have been lower, at the very least. :-) Oatmeal is almost as good as statins for lowering cholesterol (particularly when eaten in large quantities).

You would have had vitamin deficiencies, though -- most likely vitamin D (which we get today from UV irradiated milk), and in the winter when your entire vegetable intake was turnips and onions, you might have suffered scurvy, though if there was any cabbage around, that would have been less likely.

There is plenty of fiber in oatmeal -- particularly the unprocessed oatmeal available then, so you would have been regular ;-).

So, on the whole, you would have been healtier -- less fat in the diet, less saturated fat, plenty of fiber, so your cardiac health would have benefitted. However, there was less variety, and variety is how you get a good balance of vitamins, so there was a danger of rickets, and other vitamin deficiencies.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

There may well have also been saturated fats - 'add a good knob of butter' cropped up now and again, but the poor vitamin intake must have been a health problem.

I think there were probably some apples around in the winter - they just weren't in the book as they didn't need recipes. But when my grandfather described being a lad sent to work on a farm in the very early 1900s and living on oatmeal porridge, oatmeal soaked in broth, and binjean with no flavouring every day, day after day it would seem to not have been all that unusual.

Mind you, the farmer and his wife had bacon, ham, mutton etc. - so at least more protein than they gave him. He ran away and went home after about a month of that diet - he used to say he couldn't bear the food any more.

He would never eat custard for the rest of his life, or porridge. Goodness knows what he would have thought about the amount of yoghurt we eat either!

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

What's rennet? I've never heard that term before. And it would never have occurred to me to make savory oatmeal; interesting. I guess in the days before refrigeration you ate what grew locally and what didn't spoil.

I always get a kick out of those kinds of recipes books; they really reveal a lot about the region. We lived in a predominantly scandinavian area (Astoria, Oregon. The local joke was that a "mixed marriage" was when a swede marries a norwegian and the phrase "Schturdy vimin" is still a running family joke)when i was a teenager. Aside from the almost total lack of spices those people apparently eat scary amounts of herring and pastry. Lutefisk-- yikes. I almost think I'd rather eat the binjean!

My folks now live in a heavily 7th day adventist area and so the cookbook is primarily vegetarian. I actually like the cashew loaf, and I'm a fan of the curried garbanzo beans.

[rahirah]

Rennet is the stomach membrane of calves. It used to be very important in cheese-making; it contains the substance (rennin) that makes the milk curdle. I think these days most commercial cheese is made with artificially produced rennin extract, though.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I think binjean would have been called junket in the English speaking parts of Britain - and I don't think I would fancy it - even though I eat a lot of yoghurt, which I guess is not unrelated!

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

My parents were very much into the whole "processed food is from satan" thing when I was growing up. For quite a while there we grew it, made it, or hunted/fished for it ourselves. Welcome to Oregon! I still make the honey-oatmeal bread, and occasionally attempt real granola. I vividly remember the yogurt making attempt though-- not a stunning success! Yogurt is one of the things I buy ready made with no guilt whatsoever!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Me too!

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

So it's basically curdled milk? Ewwe-- I'm with grandpa on that one! thanks for so much for the info!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

From actually listening to my grandparents, and local jokes - which often have a good historical background - I think we ate herring in season, and salt herring in the winter - but for some reason that particular book almost ignored the herring. I wonder if it was so much part of their everyday life that they didn't see any point in sharing 'their' recipe for it.

And the thought of lutefisk would drive me to the binjean as well!

[gillo]

Not much saturated fat, and lots if fibre! I'd have expected more fish, somehow, which would have provided protein and fatty acids, but the very limited fresh veg and fruit would cause problems, I expect. What a dull diet - but very typical of many less-affluent communities. Look what Sainsbury's has done for you now!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

When I think about it, I'm sure that there was more fish - herring and salt herring were a traditional part of the diet - the od Manx used to say that they were brought up on 'priddhers an herrin' - (priddhers - potatoes).

I think there are no recipes for them because this is a book of people giving their 'own' recipes for things - and they probably didn't think they had a way of frying or salting herring that was any different to anyone else's.

I think they rolled the herrings in oatmeal then fried them (no surprises there then!), or put them on top of the potatoes in the pot to boil.

We owe our all to Tescos around here - or the Co-op!

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Good grief! I dunno about healthy, but I bet you'd have been bored! ;)

Old cookbooks and recipes are fascinating, aren't they? A hundred years ago - well, 106 years ago, to be exact - my grandparents were newly-weds living in New Orleans, where my grandpa worked at the Grunewald Hotel. And I have a lot of my grandmother Nona's recipes, some hand-written, and others cut out of the Picayune's food columns and annotated. Quite a contrast, as you can imagine!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. I thought if these were the recipes that the people who put the book together felt were worth sharing there couldn't have been anything very exciting around.

When I think about it, almost all the recipes were collected in Peel - a small fishing village - but there are no recipes for herring - presumably because there was no need for a recipe that says roll the herring in oatmeal and fry in lard or butter. What does surprise me is that there is no recipe for potted herring - herring baked in a mixture of brine and vinegar with spices, which I would have thought was traditional even 120+ years ago - perhaps all the women guarded their recipes for that so closely that they refused to contribute them!

I think I would much prefer your grandmother's recipes. :~)

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* Well, yeah, you'd think that if it were necessary to detail all those ways to prepare oatmeal, it would follow that "ways to cook herring" would also be there. But who knows? As you say, sometimes cooks don't like to share ALL their secrets.

Also, from a certain point of view, you could say that the recipes Nona clipped from the Picayune were the equivalent of your fishing village cookbook - the *village* being a bit larger, that's all. Rhe Picayune was then making a real effort to collect traditional recipes and preserve the secrets of the local cuisine, and the food column was part of a concerted effort to gather together the old recipes before the local cooks, many of them African-American, passed on with their stories untold.

The result, btw, was The Picaune Creole Cookbook, one of the classics in the field, published in 1901 and definitely worth reading even if you don't want to try the recipes. It's delightful!

http://www.foodhistory.com/classics/picayune/ccb.htm

Now that I think about it, the Creole exposure also explains why my mother, who, let's face it, was born in 1907 and grew up in a tiny little town in Mississippi that wasn't even ON the River, was such an amazingly creative cook - she learned from HER mom! I mean, I always read about *fifties food* with the mental reservation, "but we didn't eat stuff like that!" No salads made from Jello, f'rinstance, and not a lot of stuff made with the aid of Campbell's soups, and always green salads and lots of vegetables. Lucky me. And thanks, mom. ;)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Oh wow - thanks for the link - I shall go and devour that later - I love recipes and cook books - even though I usually cook within much the same rut over and over - something to do with a husband who doesn't eat tomato unless it is pureed; or mushrooms; won't eat meat with anything which might be construed as fruit or alcohol, or meat that requires chewing - or is any less cooked than burnt. Oh and he doesn't like salmon; or fruit except strawberries - but even then not with chocolate ... and so on!
Then the daughter doesn't eat lamb, or mushrooms, or eggs, unless they are no longer identifialble as eggs, and she isn't keen on salmon either... Sometimes it's nice to just cook something that I like, and eat it on my own!

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it's nice to just cook something that I like, and eat it on my own!

Oh, my! I can certainly understand why! Do you have to keep a chart, or by now, do you just automatically compensate for everyone's idiosyncracies? ;)

I am reminded of my Brit buddy John, whose refusal to eat certain foods - or, for example, steak unless it was cooked to death - nearly drove me nuts! I did introduce him to New Orleans cuisine on several of his visits here, and much to my shock, he actually ate strange things.... like oysters on the half shell, at the Acme (the greatest oyster bar in the known universe - make a note in case you ever get to NOLA!).

But John refused to eat anything green (except peas and green M&Ms), considered the potato the perfect vegetable which should be served at every meal, and like your husband, was pretty picky about tomatoes unless they were part of spaghetti sauce. Oh, and salads were Evil!

*sigh* I won't even try to tell you what happened when I visited him in Leeds and tried to cook in what he referred to as his kitchen and I called "a closet with something you just think is a stove." And a fridge the size of the one my daughter kept in her college dorm room. Ack!

However, I truly did enjoy the Brit grocery store experience, although I'm still a tad baffled about something called "gammon" - huh? AND I discovered DOUBLE CREAM on those visits, so I figure culinary detente was achieved! Yay!

And cool that you read cookbooks like novels! My faves are those with lots of historical and/or cultural detail, offering gateways into different regions or cultures or "how the ancestors did it." Let me give you another great rec: Classic Southern Cooking by Damon Lee Fowler, well-researched and compulsively readable. Okay, so not everyone might appreciate 10 pages on the history of baking in the South before a actual bread recipe finally appears, but damn, I loved it! History you can eat - brilliant!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I automatically compensate! This also takes in my own wheat intolerance as well - so I can cook pasta for two - put tomato sauce on one portion, cheese sauce on the second, and then put whichever there is extra of onto a bit of grilled salmon and some vegetables for myself!

The daughter will eat any sort of salad, the husband will eat Caesar Salad, potato salad, rice salad, and coleslaw at a push, especially if it has cheese in it!

Gammon is thick sliced frying ham. Which is good in a casserole including mushrooms and cider - so not something I've cooked for a few years!

Double cream is my not so secret weakness - I will eat fruit for sweet as long as I can have a spoonful of double cream on it!

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Well, daaaa-yum! Gammon = ham.

Wow, that's Yet Another Mystery solved!

Thanks, hon. ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Every time I read a recipe book from over a hundred years ago I find myself thanking whoever that I live now, have access to so many wonderful foods, and very grateful to our ancestors for managing to survive on what they did.

I tracked part of my family to the original European (trying to be PC here and it doesn't come naturally to me) settlers of Kentucky. One of the cock books that I found that fit them historically consisted of forty-seven recipes for corn.

Just corn.

pgavigan

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Every time I read a recipe book from over a hundred years ago I find myself thanking whoever that I live now, have access to so many wonderful foods, and very grateful to our ancestors for managing to survive on what they did.

Amen to that!

[missmurchison.livejournal.com]

What boggles my mind is not the diet, because I'm sure not much variety was available, but the fact that they came up with so many recipes with so few ingredients.

On the other hand, I live with a man who knows a thousand ways to cook cabbage and seems to think they all taste differently.

*hates cabbage*

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

It surprised me when I thought about it that there weren't twenty recipes for herring as well. The main variant in a number of the recipes was 'take milk from the first/second/third milking after the cow calves, and put it to sit in a cold place for one/two/three days' before you either added rennet or boiled oatmeal in it - presumably this altered fat content and the creaminess of the finished product.

Having seen all these ways of cooking oatmeal a thousand cabbage recipes seems understandable! I would even eat some of them I would think!

[modillian.livejournal.com]

This is so unintentionally hilarious. And I have no cause to laugh, because if I were born 100 years earlier I would be living off of whiskey and potatoes with my Irish forefathers.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I know - it amused me too. Whiskey must have been in short supply or they'd probably have added it to the oatmeal!

Irish forefathers

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Me too. I'd get sick of the potatoes, but I suppose I could grow to like the whisky. :-)

[manoah.livejournal.com]

I read this whilst eating my oatmeal (with brown sugar and cinammon!) this morning. I do like my morning oatmeal, but I think I'd be sick of it if I had to eat it at every meal!

And for the record, I do eat it with brown sugar substitute and to help lower my cholesterol.

You really make the most interesting posts dearie!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

You really make the most interesting posts dearie!

Thank you.

I like mine made with water rather than milk, sprinkle of brown sugar - and a spoonful of half-cream as there is no milk in it.;~)

But three or four times a week is enough!

[jerusha]

LOL! Well, that diet sounds a bit lacking in certain essential vitamins...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I guess they had fruit when it was readily available - blackberries would be free, and some people would have had an apple tree - but otherwise very low in fruit and green vegetables.

But thank heavens for Tescos!

[bojojoti.livejournal.com]

I don't think the dollop of butter would hurt you at all back then. My son was doing research on nutrition and discovered that the Amish have a much lower rate of heart disease that average Americans. They have a very hearty diet full of butter, dairy, eggs, and meat, but they do so much physical activity that they compensate for it. When you are baling hay, building barns, or plowing fields from sun up to sun down, you need those extra calories.

I like oatmeal, but once a day would be plenty.

Here, in the Midwest, it would have been corn instead of the oatmeal: corn porridge, Johnnycakes, corn pone, corn bread, creamed style corn, corn on the cob, scalloped corn, corn fritters, corn pudding, and succotash.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Yes, they would have worked hard between meals - and if it wasn't for the filling power of the oatmeal or the barley I guess they would have often felt hungry.

It is amazing how creative women were with the staples of the area they lived in. But there is definitely a limit to what you can do to make oatmeal interesting!

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Well, the people back then were smaller and died younger; no doubt they were malnourished, and yet I wonder ...
I can't help thinking in some ways they were more healthy than us -- that their failure to balance their diet is no more unhealthy than the crap we put into ours.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

That was why I wondered whether we were any healthier with all the variety we have.

But I don't think I would want to swap my coffee and a cookie for milk and oatcakes.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

No, and I don't want to give up Mountain Dew for meade.

[cbtreks.livejournal.com]

Is that because you've never had mead? Yum! (And this from someone who generally doesn't drink alcohol.)

do the Dew

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

It's not so much because I hate meade as it is because I LOVE Dew.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Meade is rather good - highly alcoholic, and not sickly sweet as you might think.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I'm just not a fan of alcoholic beverages ... it's not like I need help looking silly!

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Hello! Did you know about this? (http://www.constantinethegreat.org.uk/). I thought you might be interested.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thanks - all being well we will be spending a week or so in York at the end of September! And it will make something nice to do in between sorting out the daughter and her room at uni.

[cbtreks.livejournal.com]

My first thought (after "mmmm, gingerbread") was "all those carbohydrates would wreak havoc with my system" followed by "but that would be whole grain oats, right, and not just simple starch?". 100 years ago, people were generally much more physically active, too, so a diet that might strike us as fattening today wouldn't be then.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be particularly fattening at all - boring perhaps though!