oats Avena sativa, a cereal which grows well in moist, temperate to cool climates, and will thrive in conditions which wheat or barley would not tolerate. Oats are therefore important as human food mainly in northern regions.
However, oats were a comparative latecomer to agriculture. Wild oats (just like those proverbially sown by young people) seemed unpromising. The small grains, borne singly on straggly seed heads, dropped off as soon as ripe; a useful feature for a weed trying to spread itself, but not for a cereal crop.
The first traces of cultivation, selecting from wild strains which kept their seeds long enough to be harvested, date from about 1000 BC in C. Europe. However, the Greeks and Romans of classical times were unimpressed, regarding oats as coarse, barbarian fare; and the Romans used them mainly as animal fodder, but did foster the growing of oats in Britain, where they were to become important as a food for human beings. Indeed, they became the principal cereal in Wales and, even more markedly, in Scotland.
This pattern lasted for a long time. In the early 19th century a survey showed that the Welsh ate more oats than all other cereals combined and that in Scotland the ordinary people ate almost no other grains. Thus Dr Johnson’s dictionary definition of oats as ‘a grain which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’, although unkindly meant (Johnson later confessed to Boswell, ‘I meant to vex them’, i.e. the Scots), was accurate. There seems to be an affinity between oats and people of Celtic origin. Elsewhere in Europe, oats are less important. The main regions where they have served as human food are Russia, and to some extent Scandinavia and parts of Germany and neighbouring N. European regions. Findlay (1956), having devoted his professional life in Scotland to the subject, gives a good survey of the varieties available and the conditions which suited them.
In the New World, oats did well, thanks to Scottish emigrants who took their tastes with them. They were first grown in Massachusetts in 1602. A number of local American recipes for oats are recognizably derived from old Scottish ones. And Quaker Oats, a means of making porridge quickly, are an American invention of the mid-19th century.
Oats are processed to produce oatmeal of various grades. These and ‘rolled oats’ are explained in the box. Oatmeal is generally unsuitable for making bread of the conventional kind, owing to an almost complete lack of gluten, the substance which holds bread together. However, as Elizabeth David (1977) points out, a very fine brown bread, with ‘a wonderfully rich flavour’, can be made with a mixture of three to four parts wheat flour and one of oatmeal. Catherine Brown (1985) has reported some successful experiments on similar lines in Scotland. But the characteristics of oatmeal are such that it is used much more for oatcakes, a separate subject.
Oats are among the most nutritious of cereals, containing as much protein (16 per cent) as the finest bread wheat, and higher levels of fat than any other common cereal. They make the best porridge of all, and it is commonly held that the disproportionately large measure of success and fame achieved by Scottish people on the world stage is partly or even primarily the result of a diet including oatmeal, especially porridge. Lockhart (1997) has neatly drawn together much information about The Scots and their Oats.
Besides its primary uses in porridge and oatcakes, oatmeal features in haggis, in certain types of sausage, as a coating for herring, also for potatoes, and sometimes for dumplings. There is also a range of semi-sweet oatmeal puddings which could be eaten either as part of a meat course or separately as a sweet dish. flummery was originally made with oatmeal.
For other traditional uses of oatmeal see brewis; brose; cranachan; crowdie; groats and grits; gruel; sowans.
© the Estate of Alan Davidson 1999, 2006, 2014 © in the Editor’s contribution to the second and third editions, Oxford University Press 2006, 2014.
