Several decades on, I am still an oat-lover (in fact, I’m such a fan that I’m currently writing a book on traditional British uses of them). But if you look in my kitchen now, you’ll find many more types of oats than just my childhood rolled ones.

The choice on our shelves these days can be bewildering – groats, rolled, thick, old-fashioned, quick, instant, oatmeal, pinhead, steel-cut, sprouted, black and naked. This article is a comprehensive guide to the types of oats available, how they’ve been processed and how to use each type the traditional way.

What are oats?

Almost all of the oats you’ll find in kitchens throughout the world are seeds of the grass genus Avena Sativa. These grow covered by a hard, inedible hull which has to be removed before the seed can be used as a grain. The hull adheres strongly to the seed and in the process of removing it the grain is very often damaged and exposed to the air. This activates an enzyme called lipase which degrades the fats in the oats causing them to go rancid, giving them a bitter taste. To avoid this happening, oat grains are ‘stabilised’ (heat and steam treated) at the very early stages of processing.

Most of the oats we buy are already ‘cooked’

This stablilsation means that the oats that make it to our kitchens (unless they are naked or sprouted oats) have been ‘cooked’ using a mix of heat and moisture (at an average temperature of 90-100°C).

Once the dehulling and stabilisation has been completed, oats are processed in a number of ways. This article explains what you might see at your mill or supplier, sorted from the least-processed to the most-processed:

Types of oats, how they’ve been processed and how to use each the traditional way

Oat groats

These are whole, unground, uncut oat grain. As they are whole grains, they take the longest to cook of any oat.

These weren’t often traditionally-used for porridge (though our ancestors in the UK did use the for savoury ‘puddings’), but I think they are great cooked this way.

If you want to use oat groats for porridge/oatmeal, cook them as an alternative to rice or add them to a stew, I suggest soaking them overnight in water. The next day, drain and rinse them, before cooking for at least 35 minutes. For a cup of soaked groats, you’ll need around 3 cups of liquid (broth is a great savoury choice instead of water here!)

Stone-milled oats:

The only way of making the whole oat grains into smaller pieces, more suitable for cooking, until well into the 1900s was to process the grains in stone mill. This created a meal (rather than the more commonly found rolled oats we see today). This meal is what our European oat eating ancestors (who didn’t have rolled oats) would have eaten.

Why Our Scottish Ancestors Didn’t Eat Rolled Oats (link to article)

Stone milled oats are still available, though can be harder to source outside of the UK. They come in three grades:

Pinhead oatmeal

Oat groats ground between two millstones set very widely apart to break the groat into a few pieces.

This was traditionally used for porridge (oatmeal), particularly in Ireland.

To make a traditional pinhead oatmeal porridge, soak the oatmeal in water overnight using one part oatmeal to four parts water by weight (you can add a tablespoon of something acidic, like apple cider vinegar to aid digestion) and then, in the morning, cook the mix, adding some salt (traditionally porridge was salty, not sweet), for 20 minutes, stirring regularly.

Medium oatmeal (often called Scottish oatmeal in the US)

These oats have been stoneground with the millstones set to create a medium meal.

Medium oatmeal was traditionally used for porridge in Scotland and in many other parts of the UK. It was also used in haggis, in puddings and sausages and as a coating when frying fish.

To make a traditional medium oatmeal porridge the Scottish way, bring water to the boil and, when it’s boiling, sprinkle in the medium oatmeal, stirring constantly. Once all of the oatmeal is incorporated, turn the pan down low, add salt (traditionally porridge was salty, not sweet) and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, stirring regularly. To serve three people I use 180g medium oatmeal, 900g water and a half teaspoon salt.

Fine oatmeal

By stone-grinding the oat grains with the millstones more closely together, a fine oatmeal is produced.

Fine oatmeal was traditionally used for oatcakes – a savoury oat cracker – as well as a thickener for soups and stews.

Try my recipe for Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes which makes a delicious crêpe-like pancake or my Traditional Scottish Oatcakes recipe which will give you authentic Scottish oat crackers, great with soups or some cheese!

(If you want to try these two recipes and you don’t have fine oatmeal, don’t despair, they can easily be made with rolled oats too – follow the instructions in the recipes!)

Oats produced in steel mills:

In contrast to this traditional stone milling, most of the oats on our shelves today have been processed in modern steel mills. Here’s what you can find:

Steel Cut/Irish oats

Steel cut oats are so called because steel blades cut the whole groat into two or three pieces.

This type of oats are often called Irish oats in the US because the pieces are the same size as pinhead oatmeal, the type of oatmeal historically used to make porridge in Ireland.

In the kitchen, steel cut oats work in a similar way to their stone-ground cousin, pinhead oatmeal. If you want to make a traditional porridge with them, follow the instructions in the pinhead oatmeal section above.

Rolled Oats:

Rolled oats are so ubiquitous these days that one might think they’ve always been around. They are, however, a modern creation; the process of rolling oats only having been invented in 1877.

The Differences Between Rolled Oats and Oatmeal (link to article)

All rolled oats, whether large or small, are steam processed (for a second time, remembering they’ve already been steamed to prevent rancidity) before being rolled. This makes them softer and less likely to create dusty waste.

‘Old-fashioned’ Oats/Rolled Oats/Jumbo Oats

These, being the largest form of rolled oats, are whole oat grains that are re-steamed and run through roller mills to create large flakes.

These can be used to make a non-traditional (but very tasty!) porridge. There’s no need to soak them, cooking for 10-15 minutes on the stove does the job. If you’d like to serve traditionally, add salt during the cooking time.

I also have some traditionally-inspired recipes that use rolled oats! Try my cheesy oatcake-topped cottage pie or my sourdough oatcakes.

‘Quick Cook’ Rolled Oats

To make these smaller flaked oats, broken oat grains are re-steamed and put through roller mills.

These take just a few minutes on the stove to produce a porridge.

‘Instant’ Rolled Oats

These are the smallest, and hence the quickest cooking, form of rolled oats. They were brought to the oat market in 1966 by Quaker (who are now ownedi by Pepsi). Small pieces of oat grain are re-steamed and put through roller mills to create tiny, thin flakes.

I don’t think our ancestors would recognise instant oats (in texture or flavour). As a real food oat-lover, I’ve never used these.

The oat challenge:

If you’ve only ever used rolled oats, try something different this week. It’s easy to get hold of pinhead or steel cut oats – soak them before bed and take a few more moments in the kitchen to cook up your porridge the next morning. I think you’ll be surprised at how great it tastes!

Different Types of Oats – FAQs

Which type of oats is the healthiest?

Generally, the less a food is processed, the healthier it is. With this criteria, oat groats, that have had no further processing than their initial dehulling and stabilising are the healthiest.

But I am of the mind that the real food that you like is the healthiest. If you’re buying, cooking, and eating real food that you will like you’re more likely to continue with it – so choose the type of oat you like best.

How can I access stone-ground oats outside of the UK?

There are companies that import oats that have been stone-ground in the UK to other parts of the world. Check online to see if there’s one near you. In the US, Bob’s Red Mill sell a product called ‘Scottish oatmeal’ which is stoneground oats that are similar to British medium oatmeal.

Can I roll my own oats at home?

Yes you can! And they taste so much better rolled at home! Have a look at my article How to Roll Oats at Home (& 3 Good Reasons To Do It!).

Can I stone-grind my own oats at home?

It is possible to stone-grind oats from groats at home, but it is very difficult to replicate the pinhead/medium/fine grades of oatmeal that are available from large stone mills. This is because the stone mills use a number of sieves to sieve the meal into uniform sizes.

If you have a Mockmill, you can grind oats on any number above #3 (do not grind them on numbers #1 or #2 – the grain is too fatty and will clog up your meal). Using #3 or above will grind the oats but will give you a range of particle sizes from very fine dust to large chunks of oat groat. For making porridge this method works practically but does not replicate the porridge that you would make with uniform-sized commercially-produced oatmeal

How To Make Stone-Ground Oats in the Mockmill (link to article)

I love porridge/oatmeal. What else can I make with oats?

So many things! Here’s a selection of my traditional and traditionally-inspired recipes:

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes

Sourdough Oatcakes

Cheesy oatcake-topped cottage pie

Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment

You can get three traditional oat recipes in my free download The Heritage Oat Collection. Enter your details below and I’ll send to your inbox:

I am currently in the process of writing a book to be called Oats: Recipes & Stories from the British Isles. It will include 50 recipes along with the stories of how this grain sustained many generations of people in the UK. Stay in touch via my newsletter (there is a sign up at the top of every page on this site) to hear the latest on this.

How can I make my oats healthier?

Fermenting your oats will unlock more nutrition and make them easier to digest. Learn how in my comprehensive article:

How to Make Fermented Oats

Is buying organic oats important?

I would always recommend buying organic oats. Choosing organic means that you are supporting farmers who care for our soil and our environment, stewarding it for the next generation. It also means that any residues left over from pesticides or fertilisers aren’t on your grains.

What are ‘naked’ oats?

‘Naked’ oats are a type of oat that, instead of having a hard difficult-to-detach hull, has a paper-thin hull. It is easier to prepare these grains for human consumption – it takes a lot of energy to remove the hard hull on standard oats; not as much energy is needed to remove the paper-thin hull on ‘naked’ oats.

Because these ‘naked’ oats do not have to go through a tough, damaging, process to remove their hulls, they are not heated before they get to our shelves. This results in a oat that is raw.

What are sprouted oats?

Sprouted oats are raw oats that have gone through a soaking and germination process to sprout them. This process is then halted by drying and the sprout knocked off. The sprouted groats can then be used as you would use a standard oat.

What are black oats?

Black oats are a type of oats that has a black hull. They were traditionally grown in large areas of Scandinavia and in Wales. Here are some I saw on a visit to Holden Farm in Wales:

What about oat flour?

Oat flour is a modern phenomenon which is finer than fine oatmeal. It can be purchased but can also be made from oatmeal or rolled oats by processing them in a high-powered coffee grinder or mixer.

You might also like:

The Heritage Oat Collection

The Difference Between Rolled Oats and Oatmeal

Sourdough Porridge

The Fascinating History of Jannock: The Giant Oat Bread That Defined Authenticity!

The Best Way to Soak Oats

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

I’ve been making sowans in my kitchen regularly for over five years – I love it – and I have also delved into its history for my forthcoming book on traditional British oat dishes. If you’re curious about sowans, this is the article for you!

Sowans, with a Scottish voice, is pronounced ‘sue-ens’. You might see it spelled ‘sowens’ and in the Shetland Isles it was called ‘Virpa’

History of sowans

Although oats have been eaten in the United Kingdom for thousands of years, widespread oat farming only took hold after the Roman invasion when the troops, in order to feed their horses, brought the oat grain to the British Isles. Oats love the UK’s wet, mild climate and quickly caught on as a staple crop.

Although we don’t find the oat fermentation sowans mentioned in literature until the 1600s, it is very likely, knowing how long parts of the UK have subsisted on oats, that this dish was being made long before that date.

Oats were grown close to home. After harvest, the farmers would sent their sacks of oat grains to the mill to be ground into flour (rolled oats didn’t come onto the scene until much later, read about it in my article Why Our Scottish Ancestors Didn’t Eat Rolled Oats). Once the miller had done his job, the householder would not only get sacks of prepared oats back, but also sacks of ‘waste’ (called sids).

These sids were the hulls that had been knocked off the oats as they were processed. Clinging to them were tiny pieces of the centre of the oat grain – the white, starchy endosperm.

Sowans was a zero-waste food

Instead of being thrown away, this bag of waste, the sids, was transformed, through fermentation, into delicious, nutritious food – sowans.

When mixed with water, these sids contained everything needed to complete the fermentation naturally. The tiny pieces of white starch gave the microorganisms in the ferment starch to feed on, and the hull pieces were a haven for yeasts and bacteria. This means that no inoculant (or starter) was needed to create an active ferment – it was already natively in the grain.

Sowans is a porridge

Once the fermentation was complete, the mixture was put through a sieve which removed the pieces of hull/bran and produced a smooth, white liquid. This liquid, which contained the fermenting water and the tiny pieces of the white oat grain was then cooked to produce a porridge.

Making sowans also creates a probiotic drink called swats

The liquid that the oats were fermented with had it’s own name – swats (or swots). This can be drunk as is (and that way is a live probiotic) or can be cooked along with the sowans and therefore included in the porridge. Often, our ancestors would use a large amount of swats in the saucepan and create a liquidy ‘drinking sowans’.

Sowans was traditionally consumed by the whole family on Christmas Eve which was, in some parts of Scotland, knows as ‘sowans nicht’ (sowans night).

Sowans is a health food

Sowans was considered a health food in Scotland. Diving into the process, it’s easy to see why:

Starting with the raw ingredient – oats, as most of us know, oats are known to be beneficial to health. They have a role to play in lowering cholesterol and maintaining blood sugar levels. They also contain beta-glucan which is a prebiotic – meaning it feeds the probiotics in your intestines.

Both the sowans and swats are probiotic foods. Because we cook the porridge sowans, the live probiotics are lost. That does not mean, however, that all the benefits of the fermentation are lost; the latest research tells us that fermentation microbes which remain behind after cooking are extremely beneficial to our health (read more here).

In addition, because the starch in sowans has been both fermented and pre-digested, it can nourish us with proteins/vitamins and minerals with very little digestive effort. This allows our bodies energy to be used in healing, rather than trying to break down our food.

What does sowans taste like?

I have been making sowans and swats in my kitchen regularly, using modern ingredients and equipment, for years. Myself and my family enjoy the product of this fermentation often and love it.

Sowans is creamy and smooth – it feels to me like eating clouds! It’s nuanced in flavour – pleasantly tart but with delicious honey aromas that arise from the fermentation.

The liquid that the oats ferment in, swats, is zingy and fresh, reminiscent of watery lemon juice. It is refreshing drunk cold on a hot day but also wonderful warmed and spiced.

How do you make sowans?

We may not grow oats in our backyard or have access to sacks of sids from our local mill, but we can still enjoy the flavour and health benefits of sowans and swats in our kitchens today!

Oats can be fermented with water (I’d recommend a 1:4 ratio of oats to water) for several days, sieved and then cooked up into this historic, traditional dish.

My course, Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment, will guide you through the whole process, no matter what grains you have access to or equipment you have in your kitchen. It includes two hours of video guidance and plenty of downloads to keep at hand. I explain what to look for at every stage and how you can ensure you are safely fermenting your grains.

Here’s a little peak at one of the videos included in the course:

How to eat sowans (and swats)

I want to leave you with the ways my family eat sowans and swats:

Sowans porridge:

Most often, I make a thick porridge with sowans by mixing it with double its volume in water. Other times, I cook the fermented oats in the swats liquid (the swats) instead of water.

Traditionally, this was eaten with salt and butter, but it is also delicious with fruit, honey and nuts or any of the toppings we add to porridge/oatmeal these days!

I also love sowans as a mashed potato substitute! Here it is with sausages:

Drinking sowans:

Drinking sowans is a warming, comforting cuppa. Here, I add more liquid before cooking and make a pourable sowans. This is lovely infused with spices and sweetened with honey.

Sowans in baked goods:

Sowans can also be used as an ingredient in baked goods. Sowans scones were popular in Scotland (there’s a recipe for them in my course). I have also used sowans very effectively in bread-baking to make a ‘scald’ for my sourdough breads. Here’s a link to the recipe for the bread if you want to give it a go!

Swats

Swats is wonderful drunk as it is. It is full of probiotics, zingy and really refreshing from the fridge in hot weather.

But the way I drink it most is gently warmed. I love it straight warm – it’s comforting and nourishing drink. But most often I make what I’ve coined as ‘mulled swats’ – I gently warm the swats on the stove with spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cardamon, mace, anise.

Aside from drinking, I have used swats as the liquid part of my sourdough breads and built bread starters (or leavens) using swats. I also use the liquid as a starter in other ferments – anywhere where I need a starter.

You might also like:

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

Sourdough Oatcakes

How to Make Fermented Oats

There’s nothing like a breakfast of warm oats on a cold winter day. It’s like a hug in a bowl, and one you know will keep you going until lunch.

But have you tried making your morning oats with fermented oats?

And how about making it zero-waste and adding a probiotic oat drink on the side?

Fermenting oats, zero-waste and probiotic – they all sound so modern you might think they were part of the latest sustainability or health drive. But you’d be wrong. The Scots have been fermenting their oats into two products – a creamy porridge called sowans and a probiotic drink called swats – for centuries!

How it started

The Romans brought the oat grain to Scotland and, seeing that it was perfect for the northern climate and Scottish soil, it soon took hold. Most households back then were subsistence farms who, along with growing their own produce and raising animals, also grew oats. After harvest, they’d send their prized oat grain to the local mill.

Once the oats were ground, they’d get two sacks back from the miller: one sack contained their ground oats and the other sack was full of ‘waste’ – all the bits that had come loose from the grain kernels during the milling process.

The contents of this second sack had a special name: sids. It would have been a dusty mixture of husks (the very outside part of the grain, which protects it), hulls (the bran of the grain) and tiny white crumbs from the body of the oat grain that’d got stuck to the hulls and escaped the mill-stone’s power. Here’s how it looked:

The Scots had traditional ways to use their ground oats; oat cakes being a great example. But they also had a traditional way of using the bag of left-over oat ‘waste’, and that was to ferment it!

Let’s start with how to lacto-ferment oats…

Fermenting rolled oats is quite simple. Put your oats in a bowl, add water and a bacteria-rich starter culture (yogurt, kefir, sourdough starter etc.), stir and wait. The bacteria will start to predigest the compounds in the grain, potentially harmful plant toxins will be neutralised and beautiful fermented flavours will start to develop. (If you want to learn how to do this, check out my video Healthy, Fermented Oats).

The Scots’ extreme oat fermentation!

The Scots took their oat fermentation a step further – wild fermenting the bag of ‘waste’ returned to them by the mill.

The white starchy ‘crumbs’ from the inside of the grain provided the food for the bacteria and yeasts naturally present on the broken pieces of hull/husk left behind after milling. No starter culture was needed, the only addition being water.

And what they got…

After up to two weeks of fermentation, the Scots strained the husk/hull pieces from the fermented mixture and were left with the two foods: Sowans, a creamy porridge and Swats, a tangy drink:

Both were health foods. The sowans because the fermentation process had not only neutralised plant toxins and pre-digested many of the starches, but it had also had the harder-to-digest bran fibre strained out. The swats because, drunk as is, it was full of probiotic bacteria.

And all this, from ‘waste’?!

How we can recreate this in our kitchen

Re-creating sowans and swats in our modern-day kitchens, where we are far more likely to buy in our oats than grow them in our backyard, requires some ingenuity, but is worth the effort.

I’ve been fermenting oat grain into sowans and swats regularly for many years in my home. I love the liquid swats gently heated with spices and my 11-year old son adores the smooth, ice-cream-like texture of the sowans as his morning porridge.

Most often, I use a roller mill to make the grain into porridge oats and ‘waste’ crumbs, but I’ve also often made sowans and swats by pulverising oat groats in my blender or with oat flour.

If you’re interested in taking your oat fermentation to the next level and stepping into the shoes of a Scot a few hundred years ago, check out my course, Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment. In it, I’ll guide you through how to make the ferment with whatever equipment you have in your kitchen.

I love it and want everyone to be enjoying it, but I’ve noticed that most people have never heard of boza. Hence this post! In it, I’ll explain what the drink boza is, its history, how it’s made and what it tastes like.

What is boza?

Boza is a fermented drink that is native to the European regions we now call Turkey, the Caucuses and the Balkans. Made with millet, it’s gluten-free, dairy-free and, thanks to the fermentation, probiotic. It’s thick, fizzy, tangy and deeply satisfying.

What is the history of boza?

The first time the word ‘boza’ is recorded as being used to describe a fermented drink was the 14th century, but, incredibly, fermented millet drinks have been made since the 9th century BCE, meaning that a drink really similar to boza has been around for 11,000 years!

The heyday of boza was during the Ottoman Empire. A 17th-century traveller to Istanbul reported that the city housed 300 boza shops that employed over a thousand people!

There are still shops selling boza in Istanbul, one of the most famous being Vefa, which was founded in 1876 and is now run by the original owners great-great-grandchildren. You can see the shop here.

As well as being available in shops, boza has a long history of being sold by street vendors, who would wander the streets of Istanbul carrying boza in metal containers hung on milk pail-style apparatus. They had a very distinctive call. You can watch a short clip of one here.

If you’d like to read more about the environment in which boza-sellers worked, the main character in Orhan Pamuk’s 2014 novel A Strangeness in My Mind (a book that was shortlisted for the 2016 International Booker Prize) is a Turkish boza-seller.

What is boza made of?

The earliest records of boza-style fermented drinks used the grain millet. As the drink has travelled to different geographies and been influenced by changing crops, it is now often made with other grains such as corn or wheat.

I use millet in my own kitchen to make boza which creates a drink which is not only dairy-free but also gluten-free and lectin-free. Students of my boza course have also made the fermented drink with sorghum, amaranth and teff (as you can see below!).

Why should I make boza at home?

Boza is a simple, inexpensive drink to make and one that is exciting, delicious and probiotic. It’s great to have in the fridge when you want a healthy snack to turn to. In addition, if you’re looking to bring more probiotics into your life, making and consuming boza is a way that you can do this without relying on dairy, gluten, lectins or, importantly, expensive shop-bought beverages or tablets.

How do you make boza?

To make boza, hulled, cooked millet is mixed with yeast and left to ferment. The microbes doing the fermentation produce acids which make the drink tangy along with small amounts of alcohol.

What yeast can I use to make boza at home?

Some people use packets of commercial yeast in the boza-making process (and this is how boza is made in shops today).

Some experiment with sourdough starter, but I find this creates a drink that is too sour.

I choose to create my own starter full of natural yeasts using a small amount of cooked millet and some sugar. I then inoculate a bigger batch of cooked millet with this home-made starter, which ensures delicious results!

“I’m so impressed with this course. I’d never even heard of boza and now I’m addicted to it!” Deb, student of my course Boza: The Probiotic Millet Drink

What does boza taste like?

Boza is sweet, fizzy on the tongue, tangy and slightly sour. The cooked millet adds a creaminess to the drink too. You can vary the thickness (by adding more or less water) depending on your preference but it is generally a satisfyingly-thick drink which can also be eaten with a spoon.

Boza has generally become sweeter over time. Historically it was a more sour drink. My own method produces a drink that balances the sweet and sour flavours – I think the boza in my home is probably much less sweet than the boza you can currently buy in Istanbul.

What is the alcohol content?

The alcohol content of boza is low. In Turkey there is legislation saying that it cannot be greater than 2%. In my experience, when making boza at home, the alcohol content is much lower. General agreement states that home-made boza is less than 1% alcohol.

How is boza traditionally served?

Historically, boza has been served in the winter. This is because without refrigeration it was difficult to stop the drink over-fermenting in warm summer temperatures.

In addition, traditionally boza is seen as a warming and nourishing drink (even though it is served cold).

If you go to Istanbul today and buy boza, it will be served with roasted chickpeas and cinnamon on the top.

What are some other ways of serving boza?

In my home, boza is most often drunk (or eaten with a spoon) as a snack. My husband and son love it when they return home after a walk or an energetic trip out.

We consume it cold. In the summer, it’s really refreshing. In the winter, the thickness and fizzyness is very satisfying.

Here are some other ideas for serving boza:

• Top it with ground linseed or toasted nuts
• Use it as a yogurt alternative to top fruit or oatmeal/porridge
• Gently heat it up and sip it from a mug whilst warming your hands
• As a base for smoothies: Boza makes a brilliant non-dairy base for a probiotic smoothie. We like to add egg yolks, linseed, fruits or cocoa powder!
• Boza popsicles: Freeze boza in popsicle moulds for a delicious, healthy summer treat.

If you’d like to make boza in your own kitchen check out my step-by-step video course here

You’d be wrong.

Yes, the Scottish have been eating porridge for over a thousand years. But no, they didn’t use rolled oats.

Why didn’t the Scottish use rolled oats for their porridge?

Rolled oats are a modern invention. They’ve only been around since 1877. That was the year a machine that rolled oat grains into flakes was invented. This machine very quickly fell into the hands of what would become the Quaker oat company. Back then, Americans didn’t eat oats and in addition, breakfast cereals weren’t a ‘thing’.

The technique of rolling made the oats both more visually appealing and easier to cook and the Quaker company saw an opportunity. They registered the first trademark for a breakfast cereal (which they called oatmeal). The trademark included the name Quaker (chosen as a symbol of good quality and honest value) and the traditionally-dressed figure that we still see on Quaker oat packets today.

Quaker then went on, in 1882, to launch a ground-breaking marketing campaign that included running the first ever national magazine adverts for a breakfast cereal and delivering free trial-size samples of Quaker oats door-to-door.

It was a hit. Rolled oats were taken to heart by the US population and have been a staple at breakfast tables ever since. Quaker were (and still are) the leading manufacturer of oats (and their oat marketing campaign obviously paid off economically as they were bought by Pepsi in 2001 for $14 billion!)

But back to the Scots: If they’ve been eating porridge for over a thousand years, but rolled oats have only been around one hundred and fifty years, what did they do before?

To understand this, we need to dive briefly into oat history.

When our ancestors first discovered that oats were good to eat, they would have ground the grains between two stones to make a rudimentary flour. Later, in the Neolithic era (4,500-2,500 BCE) this technology was developed into the rotary quern. Two people, generally women, would work the quern, turning the handle manually. It was hard work (so much so that a recent study by Cambridge University has shown that Neolithic women had arm muscles 16% stronger than current Olympic rowers). The concentrated carbohydrate provided by the grain was obviously worth the effort!

Later still, stone mills were developed, and in oat-growing areas of Scotland (and England), these were often built alongside kilns so that the oats could be both toasted and ground efficiently.

The Scots ate these stone-ground oats – oat groats transformed into meal by manual grinding. In the UK, this type of oats is called oatmeal. Oatmeal was used to make porridge and oaten breads (plus all the other oat goodies that I hope to highlight in my forthcoming book).

Oatmeal comes in three grades: fine, medium and coarse. Traditionally, different dishes call for different types.

Here is fine oatmeal:

Here is medium oatmeal:

Differing definitions of the word oatmeal

I am from the UK and four years ago I started a podcast with an American. Pretty soon it became clear to me that the word oatmeal means one thing to people from the UK and another thing to Americans. Let’s clear that up.

In the US:

Oatmeal = oats (usually rolled) cooked with water/milk into a thick, soupy, warm dish.

In the UK:

Oatmeal = whole oats that have been stone-ground into a meal. These come in fine, medium and coarse grades. When oatmeal is (or in fact rolled oats are) cooked with water/milk into a thick, soupy, warm dish, it’s called porridge.

These days, even in areas where once whole communities only survived because of oatmeal, it is very hard to buy it on an English shopping street. Quaker has done such a good job of marketing rolled oats to the world that one might be mistaken in thinking that, along with oat-eating, rolled oats have been around for thousands of years.

But as Mornflake, a miller of oats in Cheshire, UK, since 1675 says on their website “Any serious porridge traditionalist will tell you that [porridge] should always be made with oatmeal. At the World Porridge-Making Championship you’d be turned away at the door with rolled oats!”

How will my porridge/oatmeal differ if I use oatmeal instead of porridge oats?

I’ve made porridge with both medium-grade oatmeal and rolled oats. The oatmeal version takes longer to cook, absorbs more water and has a more gritty texture than the rolled oats version. I like to make and serve it as the Scots did – cooked with plain water, a little salt added just before it’s done and then eaten with a small bowl of cream on the side to dip each spoonful into!

Want to try making your oatmeal/porridge the traditional Scottish way? With stone-ground oatmeal instead of rolled oats?

I’d suggest trying medium grade oatmeal.

If you are in the UK, you can find oatmeal through online suppliers relatively easily.

If you’re in the US, it takes a little more online work but, when I tried, a brief search threw up at least one supplier.

If you give it a go, next time you’re stirring the porridge pot ready for breakfast you’ll know that you’re truly stepping into the shoes of your Scottish ancestors and extending a tradition that’s been around for thousands of years, not one created one hundred and fifty years ago.

P.s If you love oats, you might like my course on the traditional Scottish oat ferment, sowans. Have a look by clicking on the picture below:

Looking back over what I wrote, I’m astounded: it’s an incredible amount of work!

Yet this is a fraction of what women did in the home just a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was ale, a lot of ale, but there was also making bread, dairying, looking after children, cleaning, tending to the garden and animals, ensuring everyone was clothed and much more.

And in pre-industrial households, it’s not as if the men didn’t work! Partnerships were very practical, both sexes depending on each other to subsist. Some tasks were generally undertaken by women (because of their physicality or nature), some by men.

The household was a unit of economic value. Society lived by that value.

That all changed with industrialisation.

At that moment, we began to outsource women’s and men’s household work. That outsourcing was mainly organised by men who started doing it ‘more efficiently’ and for a profit. House-holders then had to travel outside the home to work.

No more preparing breads with the best available ingredients, no more home-brewed ale, no more keeping animals, no more drinking fresh milk.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we now have mass-produced, foreign-flour bread with a list of additives as long as our arms, packaged in plastic (that ends up in our fish) and transported across countries in polluting lorries.

Instead of home-made ale we have homogeneous beers. We have wines made of grapes whose natural yeasts are killed before being inoculated with lab grown cultures. We have global brands of sugar-filled soft drinks.

And the Western world is full of disconnected, dissatisfied people with ever-decreasing health. I know that you know it’s not a coincidence.

And yet in our world at large, women who decide not to ‘work’, to instead stay at home and care for their children, tend a garden and make meals from fresh ingredients are lost members of society, literally deemed (until very recently in the US at least) unemployed because they don’t make an economic contribution.

I am thankful that there are women and men out there who are shouting as loud as they can about the value of home-making and I want to add to their call.

What can I do?

How can I amplify my voice and the voices of so many women, like me, who know the value of this work and want the world to realise what it’s ignoring, what it’s devaluing, what we’ve lost?

These are questions I ask myself every day.

As well as moving back to the UK this summer, my husband Rob and I have decided to home-school our son, Gabriel. One of the biggest factors in this decision has been how much we value the work that we both do in our home. We want to pass these important skills onto our son.

Yes, we want him to know how to read and write and yes, we want him to know that he can pursue the things that light him up, but we also want him to know what it takes to run a household sanely and healthily.

We don’t have a daughter; we’ll be passing what society deems women’s work on to our son. Because there’s a bigger issue here than how work was, is or should be divided between women and men. Taking responsibility for all the facets of personal and societal health within the home is important and society has devalued and pushed it away for too long. We want it to flow through the veins of our child notwithstanding his gender.

So that, as well as being able to turn his hand to making traditional ale at home, he will also know how to how to bake proper bread, how to feed himself well, how to work with the ingredients around him, and how to provide for himself.

In order to turn around the numerous problems our modern Western society has, we must begin to value again the life-giving, holistic work that has been carried out by women and men for thousands of years inside the four walls of the home.

p.s. If you’d like to have a go at the ale, I’m enthusiastically behind you. There’s an ale and brewing thread on the podcast patreon forum (you can join here for just $5 a month) where I can provide additional support and guidance.

This post outlines how I make unhopped ale of the kind my female English ancestors did in their own kitchens until just a few hundred years ago.

Because, yes, ale was women’s work.

For most of history, the realm of fermented drinks has very definitely been under the control of women. And, up until the commercialisation of ale and beer (which started in the UK in the 1400s and took many centuries to complete), ale – the unhopped precursor to beer – was made at home, in a kitchen, by women. It was part of their household work, just like making bread was.

My ale is a replica of one from the 1200s or 1300s. It’s a ‘weak’ ale (as opposed to the ‘strong’ ale that was served to the wealthy and/or on special occasions) and I’ve based it on a recipe from Judith Bennett’s book Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England, interpreted by Tofi Kerthjalfadsson (his great article on it is available here).

The main differences between my interpretation and Tofi’s are that:

• I make ale with home-made yeast, not commercially bought yeast.
• I use pots and pans that I have around, rather than modern ones made specifically for brewing.
• I do not sanitise my vessels using a chemical solution.

These three differences make a different ale to my peers who replicate medieval ale whilst leaning on modern convenience. I feel strongly about them; doing it this way I am replicating what would actually have been done originally and I’m also trusting in the power and wisdom of traditional food ways to produce a beverage, as millions of people did up until the last few centuries. What did people do before Pasteur’s isolation of yeast cultures; before the manufacture of synthesised cleaning materials in a factory; before air locks? They made fermented drinks at home and enjoyed them!

This ale compared to modern beer

This ale is very different to modern beer, do not expect it to be like anything we call beer these days! It tastes different, it looks different, it keeps differently, it’s made in a different way and it uses home-cultured yeast.

This, being English (and, to a greater extent British) ale, it is also different to medieval continental ale. On the continent, hops were introduced to brewing much earlier than in the UK and the common pre-hopped ale – gruit, was heavily spiced and different to the usually plain UK ale.

Differences between this beer and modern beer:

• The flavour – it is not bitter, it is sweet
• The colour – it is opaque
• The viscosity – it is much thicker
• The strength – it is much weaker
• The yeast used – this is a home cultured yeast with diverse strains; I’ve not been able to test what strains are in it; in comparison laboratory yeast has one strain.
• When it is served – this ale was served fresh, still fermenting, or very recently having ended fermenting, unlike modern beer.
• Uniformity – because of the above, and because were making this at home each batch is different.
• The place in which it was made – this was made by women in their kitchens.
• The equipment – copper kettles, kitchen equipment, and sometimes barrels, no thermometers! These days brewers have hydrometers to measure the amount of sugar in the brewing liquid both before and after the fermentation. Medieval brewers did not have this. Because of this the technique is not so efficient.
• The sterilisation – every brewing book you read these days tells you to sterilise all your equipment with chemical sterilisation liquid; this was not done in the past.
• The process – this is a home process, done on a small scale, with human intervention every stage, hops were not used and there was no boil of the wort.
• The place it held in peoples lives – this was drunk multiple times a day, every day; though not necessarily because the water was bad (there is much debate on this topic among beer historians).
• The keeping qualities – this beer does not last. Bittering hops are antibacterial and keep bacteria out of the brew. As I don’t use these, the flavour of my ale is sweeter but also that the beer spoils more quickly; in addition I am not bottling to keep out oxygen (modern beers are bottled).

I see every one of the differences above as a positive thing. I love the flavour of this beer and I love the work involved in making it!

When did it all change?

The changes that saw unhopped, home-brewed ale being replaced by the bitter hopped, factory-made beer that we are used to today took place slowly, from the 14th century to the 18th century. They happened first in towns and cities, later in rural areas. They were initiated by the plague, and by the immigration of Flemish people to the UK who brought their hopped beer with them.

If you’d like to read about my journey of exploration to get to making this ale, plus learn more about earlier grain brews, home yeasts and why I brew this way, dive into this post or this podcast:

The Method:

Making ale has three distinct phases:

• Malt the grain (you can buy pre-malted grain)

• ‘Mash’ (infuse) that malt to make the wort (the liquid to be fermented)

• Ferment the wort

Disclaimer!! My recreation of this beer has, so far, been a three/four year exploration. Every batch is different – yours will be too. Each time I brew, I learn. Please understand there are many, many variables involved in brewing that can take a lifetime to master…and have fun!

Ingredients (to make three litres/quarts of ale)

1/ Grains for malting

(You’ll need 700g of total malt. This can be made, in my experience, from 850g of grain (prepare more rather than less to be safe).

I make my own malt and will detail how here. You can alternatively buy malt from a brewing supply company. It will need to be crushed, so if you don’t have a grain mill, buy it pre-crushed.

2/ Unchlorinated water

Water quality and ingredients make a huge difference to the end result. I am still exploring this. At this stage, it’s enough to say chlorine inhibits fermentation and you need to use unchlorinated water.

3/ Yeast starter

I use a robust home cultured yeast starter in the form of boza. You can access my course and make this for yourself here. I have also used rye bread kvass as a starter and also, on occasion, made a home-made yeast culture created with rye flour, salt (to inhibit bacteria), sugar (to encourage yeast) and a liquid made from boiling rosemary and water together (again to inhibit bacteria). If you’re interested in making your own culture, I’d suggest reading Lars Garshol’s Farmhouse Brewing Techniques.

Equipment

• 5 litre/quart fermentation vessel (with a lid)
• A heatproof surface to rest the fermentation vessel on (I use a breadboard)
• Towels big enough to wrap the fermentation vessel for insulation
• Clips (or a big elastic band) to secure the towels
• Thermometer
• Saucepan
• Scales
• Jug
• Wooden spoon
• Timer
• Bottles (for this amount I use three 1-litre/quart bottles)
• A funnel to fit your bottle necks
• A sieve/colander with bigger-than-sieve sized holes
• A fine sieve
• Making of malt also requires jars/gauze to soak and sprout your grain plus a way to dry them (a dehydrator is ideal, and oven is possible) and way to crush them (I use a handcranked roller mill, but an electronic grain mill will work too).

Timings

This ale takes time, especially if you are malting. Here’s an example of how a brewing/drinking session might go:

• Sunday night – soak grain
• Monday morning – drain and start grain sprouting
• Thursday and Friday – dehydrate malted grain (I do this in two batches as my dehydrator is not big enough for all of it)
• Friday pm – grind malt
• Saturday – make wort (malt infused water) for ale
• Saturday pm – strain grain from wort and pitch yeast
• Monday pm (or Tuesday am) – strain ale and bottle
• Monday pm till Thursday or Friday – drink ale!

In addition, if you are creating your own yeast culture, you’ll need to time it to coincide with your pitching day.

Malting

I malt my own grain for brewing. I recommend doing this from an authenticity/connection perspective, but it is time-consuming, so if you prefer, you can buy pre-malted grains from a brewing supply store.

What malting is:

Malting is soaking and then sprouting a grain so that starches are converted into sugars ready for the yeast in fermentation to use as fuel.

What grains you can use:

Any grain that will sprout! Traditionally barley was used, (it’s important to buy malting grade barley if you want to use barley because there are different types).

The grains I use:

I have rye in my kitchen all the time, so I naturally worked with that. I read later that oats were very often used medieval England and, because I had some that I knew would sprout (most oats don’t sprout) I decided to use them too. I use the quantity of oats that aligns with the amount used in medieval England. I have not used barley; it has been a hassle to source barley in Italy.

How to test a grain:

Make sure your grain will sprout before you try to do a large quantity. Very often grains are irradiated or left too long and won’t sprout. Test a small amount first (using the same process as below, but with a small quantity).

How to malt:

Soak your grain, ideally in a large unlidded glass vessel covered with a piece of gauze secured by elastic band, for 12 hours in ample unchlorinated water. Drain and rinse several times with water. Leave the container of grains at a 45° angle somewhere they can freely drain. Return to the container every 12 hours and rinse, agitate and drain two or three times.

After a day or so you should see small white sprouts beginning to appear on the grains. Continue with the process until the majority of grains have sprouts that are a centimeter long.

There are people who have spent their entire life studying malting, judging when to stop the sprouts and when to continue them is something that we learn over time.

Dehydrating malt:

The malt was traditionally kilned in order to preserve it, make it easier to work with and, later, to bring out flavours in it.

I dehydrate my malt. Once it is sufficiently sprouted, I rinse and drain it well and then transfer it to a dehydrator at 50°C for around 12 hours until it is completely dry. It will keep like this for months and months.

Preparing the malt for use:

Two things need to be done to the dehydrated malt:

The tails need to be removed as best they can be (as they impart a bitter taste to the ale). The easiest way I have found to do this is to put a quantity of the malt into a wide tray (like a roasting tin) and rub handfuls of it between palms, agitating well. You should see the tails coming off. When it feels like you’ve removed the majority of them, put the results through a medium sieve to separate the tails and the malted grains. Discard the tails.

The malt needs to be crushed to allow easy access to the sugars in it. I do this by grinding it. I have found that if I spray the malt lightly with water to dampen it a few hours before grinding, I’m less likely to cause the grains to disintegrate into powder as they are ground. This works well for my style ale because it is not strained in the same way as modern beer therefore an overabundance of flour like particles will thicken it too much.

Mashing

This is the process of steeping the malted grain in hot water in order to extract the sugars from the grain into the water. Once this has been done, the mash is strained and the water (called wort) is then used for the fermentation.

1. 1. Prepare the vessel by warming it up (to avoid the shock of very hot water on glass) and wrapping it in a towel. Ensure it’s on a heat-proof surface.
   2. Boil 470 ml water and pour into the vessel from a height (the water is added from a height to cool it down before it hits the grain and to oxygenate it).
   3. Add all the malted, crushed grain.
   4. Boil 690 ml of water and pour in slowly from a height, stand for 10 minutes with the lid on.
   5. Boil 230 ml of water and pour in slowly from a height, stand for 20 minutes with the lid on.
   6. Stir it (it should be like thick porridge) and replace the lid.
   7. Leave for at least 90 minutes with the lid on (I often place a towel over the lid too)
   8. Boil 600 ml of water and pour in slowly from a height, stir, leave for 25 minutes with the lid on.
   9. Boil 920 ml of water and pour in slowly from a height, stir and replace the lid.

This mixture now needs to be left. Most grains mash well in a solution that is between 57°C and 72°C. I take the temperature of the mash over the hours after finishing the process and once it’s around 50°C I know that I can strain it.

The yeast can be pitched when the wort is that fermentation temperature, or slightly above. I’ve learnt to ferment my beer at 20°C, and therefore try to pitch the yeast when it’s between 20°C and 25°C.

Sometimes, if I judge it appropriate, I will leave the mash overnight to cool, and pitch the yeast in the morning.

Other times, if I think that’s going to be too long, but I don’t have enough time to let the wort cool naturally before bed, I will immerse the fermenting vessel in washing-up bowl full of water and ice blocks. It then cools down very quickly (taking it from 50°C to 20°C in just over an hour) and I can pitch the yeast.

Straining the mash

Once the temperature of the mixture is below 50C, I strain the mash through a metal colander that has large holes, pushing down on the soaked grain in order to release as much liquid from it is possible. Some smaller parts of the soaked malt will go through the sieve, but I will then remove these during the bottling process, when I use a finer sieve.

I briefly rinse out the vessel used for the mash and return the wort to it for the fermentation.

It can be useful, at this stage, to taste the wort. This will give you a ground zero idea of what you’re fermenting, then, as the ferment progresses you can taste and compare the flavours.

Yeasts

What yeast would have traditionally been used in this ale:

A home-cultured, multi-strained yeast that would have been shared between brewers. Originally these yeasts would have been sourced from nature. Archaeologists have found that beers before 1 CE invariably included fruits and/or honey in them, possibly as the yeast. More recently there are stories that have been passed down of people ‘capturing’ yeasts and culturing them, in Scandinavia with rye flour, at home.

The diversity of multi-strains yeast cultures is astounding compared to single-strain factory-produced packets yeast. I remember hearing Lars Garshol (author of Farmhouse Brewing Techniques) saying that, compared to the total 150 commercially available single-strain yeasts, a lab, when testing kveik, a single yeast culture from farmhouse brewing, found over 280 different strains of yeast!

Types of yeast we can use:

We can culture our own yeast. We can do this by using ‘wild’ yeast (i.e. making a small amount of wort and leaving it out to collect organisms – as opposed to commercial ‘wild’ yeast which is collected from something in nature and then isolated in a lab). We can also do this by using a grain, a bacteria inhibitor (like herb or salt), a little bit of sugar and time – a bit like a sourdough starter.

I culture yeast regularly at home for other fermented drinks (like boza and kvass). These cultures are strong and I like to use them in my beer.

Fermentation

I pitch 150 g of the boza when the wort is at temperature. I stir it in well. I put the lid back on the fermentation vessel and I put it in the place where I wanted to ferment. I try to ferment at 20°C, in the summer this is harder, in the winter I use a home-made proofing box.

I came to 150g of boza (I use the same amount of rye bread kvass) through trial and error. I cannot easily translate this to your yeast culture as we don’t have access to laboratory facilities that would be able to test how much yeast there is in our home-made ferments.

I settled on 20°C as a fermentation temperature through trial and error. I have found, that when I do it at higher temperatures, the beer tends to produce a banana flavour much more strongly. This is a byproduct of the fermentation and can be produced in high quantities when the yeast is more stressed. Yeasts can be stress for many, many reasons: the water is not the right pH, the water has the wrong balance of minerals, the water doesn’t have enough oxygen in, there’s too much yeast in the mix, there’s too little yeast in the mix, the temperature is too high, the temperature is too low, there are too many sugars available, there are too few sugars available, the fermentation is left too long. So many! It is the work of a lifetime to hone this process.

For my ale I generally leave the fermentation 2 to 2 1/2 days.

What happens during that time:

It takes a while for the fermentation to get going, but after 12 hours you’ll start to see a head (called a kraussen) forming at the top. This is made up of larger particles of the wort and byproducts of the yeast and is great because it forms a protective barrier between the fermentation and the air (which could potentially bring in a lot of other bacteria to the mix).

If you watch the fermentation (through a glass container) you will often see, as you do with other ferments like water kefir, particles moving up and down in the wort and also bubbles appearing and popping on the surface.

Try not to disturb the fermentation too much during this period. Don’t move it and don’t stir it.

After two days I taste the ale. Through experience I have come to know what flavour is best at the point of stopping the fermentation. This fermentation is stopped much earlier than modern beers; it is served fresh or still fermenting. Generally, if the mix has lost most of its sweetness and is tasting beery, I will end the fermentation.

Straining and second flavouring

I then strain the ale into bottles. I use a much finer sieve for this than the one I used to strain the wort before fermentation.

I use glass swing-top bottles. Some caution must be applied to the use of these, because the ale, still fermenting, is likely to off-gas and if you are not very careful in your monitoring of it, a bottle could smash.

Some swing-top bottles have much tighter seals than others. If you’re using glass bottles get to know your bottles and check the ones that have a tight seal regularly, burping the beer. If in any doubt, leave the swing-top bottles open during the long overnight stretch, especially at the beginning of the ale’s life.

If you are unsure about using glass bottles, you can instead use plastic bottles that will expand with the production of gas see you can actually see whether they need the top unscrewing to release this gas.

Sometimes I add flavour and or extra sweetener to the second ferment. The extra sweetener gives the beer a carbonation (although I usually bottle it whilst it still has some fermentation activity happening, so this carbonation happens naturally in the bottle if the seal is tight). Flavouring gives the beer an additional dimension. I’ve used many spices, my favourites being caraway, cinnamon bark, anice and fennel. I also sometimes use redbush tea.

I usually leave these bottles out for around 12 hours, checking the level of remaining fermentation, then I’ll transfer them to the fridge.

Drinking

The ale lasts 4-5 days in the fridge. It’s character changes over that time, and it is mostly best around the second day.

Making bread with the spent grain

The spent malt grain strained out from the wort before fermentation is sweet and can be used to make breads with.

I have experimented with several recipes that use a large percentage of this waste malt in them – a rye with spices and molasses has been my favourite ’special’ loaf so far. I also very often simply use the malt as a 10% by weight addition to loaves.

This ale-making process (with home-cultured yeast, kitchen equipment, no sterilisation and open fermentation), is not something I’ve been able to find anyone else doing. If you’d like to engage with it, to try it, to move it forward, I’d love it. Please do talk to me – comment here or mail me at alison @ ancestralkitchen.com and let me know!

Edwin Waugh, Sketches of Lancashire Life, 1855

“Can you rely on his support?” “Yes, lad, oi’m sartin he’s jonnock”

Notes and queries, 1882

Industrialisation, technological development and its partner, globalisation have led to not just a loss of culinary diversity; we’ve also, in parallel, lost so much linguistic uniqueness.

The oat bread called jannock, from the northern county of Lancashire in England, tells the story of both of these changes.

Many dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary, include an entry for jannock which reads as follows:

“Jannock”: fair, genuine, straightforward.

And indeed jannock used to be a word in common parlance to describe something genuine. I have found it in transcriptions of speeches from the English parliament (it’s said to have been used by the famous Victorian Prime Minister, Gladstone) and it was part of the Lancashire dialect until very recently.

But jannock was an oat bread long before it was a way to describe something as fair or honest. It was the unadulterated qualities of jannock that prompted its transport into local vernacular. The bread was always made of oats and solely oats (unlike other breads that were often mixed with peas or beans). It could be relied on to be ‘the real deal’ and that motivated the communities that ate it to start referring to other things that were straightforward and honest as ‘jannock’.

The History of the Jannock

In 1327 the young English King Edward III came to the throne and needed a marriage that would help cement his political security. He chose the Flemish Philippa of Hainault (in Flanders, now Belgium) and they married in York.

Edward then invited communities from Philippa’s home to settle in the UK, and many of them came to Lancashire. It is said that they brought the jannock with them.

The first written mention of jannock is in the 1500s, as part of the text for the Chester Plays (a series of plays performed by the tradesmen of the city of Chester to illustrate stories from the Bible to the illiterate masses). It is then also included in other texts from the 1500 and 1600s, being defined in English, Latin, Dutch and Italian dictionaries as a loaf made solely of oatmeal.

What Was a Jannock?

The jannock was originally oats and water formed into a wide, circular, sloping loaf and baked. It was made in various sizes, some of them very big! In 1902 the jannock was reported as being 9 pounds in weight, 20 inches across, 4 inches in the centre sloping down to 1 inch at the side^[1]. When we remember that the average large pizza is around 12 inches, we can grasp just how big the jannock could be!

The jannock became a favourite and staple food for working class communities in the early manufacturing towns of the area. The large circular breads were cut into slices called “thwacks” or “thwangs” that could easily be put in a pocket. This gave the bread a huge advantage over the other popular oat bread of the region; the thin, fragile havercake which “did not satisfy the appetite or offer the same staying power as the compact, fresh, sweet and at the same time soft conditioned, jannock”.

As a bread, jannock was made in many northern counties of the United Kingdom – but survived the longest in these Lancashire communities. It was still being made there at the turn of the 20th century (below you will see a picture of a jannock shop in Standishgate, Lancashire, 1889).

Recreating the Jannock

For a bread that was so renowned for being straightforward that it gave birth to its own adjective, recreating an authentic jannock is challenging! Though most original sources point to jannock being an unleavened bread made solely of oats, some define it sour (being made with buttermilk) and yet others, from a slightly later period, talk of it as a fruit loaf! It seems that, as with so many other regional recipes, each particular area made it their own and that, as dried fruit became more readily available and the advent of the home oven meant jannocks did not have to be made at the bakery, home cooks could add the luxury of fruit to this satisfying, simple loaf.

I have been unable to find any recipe or direction for how to make a jannock. Re-envisioning it in my own kitchen has seen me considering every word of the original quotes that I’ve found and much fun experimentation.

In my forthcoming book Oats: Stories & Recipes from The British Isles, I will share three recipes, one for an unleavened three-ingredient jannock, a second for a sourdough version and a third mixing in dried fruit for a sweeter option. Stay connected via my newsletter or Ancestral Kitchen Podcast to get news on the book!

Roeder, Charles. Notes on Food and Drink in Lancashire and Other Northern Counties, 1902. ↑

Ridiculously-processed is my term…‘extruded’ is the scientific term. Yes, some of the contents of the cereal packet may have started life as a grain but let me share with you what happens to that grain in just one of the leading oat-based breakfast cereals:

The oats are steam/heat-treated, ground into a paste with other ingredients (synthetic vitamins, sugar, salt and preservatives) and formed into pellets. These pellets are then loaded into a pressurised chamber. The pressure in this chamber is suddenly released, making the water vapour in the pellets expand which results in the the pellets puffing up in size.

Do we really need this to make our breakfast palatable?

Is this an example of how ‘advanced’ our society has become?

Today I want to tell you about a traditional Cornish oat breakfast: Pillas-gerts. Pillas-gerts was a type of gerty-milk; milk or water thickened with flour that was regularly eaten for breakfast. Pillas-gerts was a gerty-milk made with the locally-grown (quite often home-grown) variety of oat, pillas. And yes, it was processed; but good processed! Processed on a kitchen hearth with local materials to get the grain out of its husk and make it tastier.

I found out about gerty-milk, and the version made with pillas, from Harriet Gendall, a researcher who is currently doing a PhD on the ’small naked oat’ at the University of Kent and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This oat was traditionally cultivated across various parts of Britain and Ireland under the name ‘pilcorn’, as well as in northern France, and in Cornwall where it was known as ‘pillas’. The last Cornish crop was reportedly harvested at Sancreed – near Land’s End – in 1867, while it continued in remote parts of West Ireland into the 1930s. Up until recently, when Harriet began her work, it has largely resided in seedbanks.

Oats are usually surrounded by a two-part husk which can be challenging to remove, but pillas is a ‘naked’ oat which means the husk surrounding the kernel is paper-thin and comes off more easily. Because of this, pillas became very popular in the UK and, as well as being an important chicken and pig feed, was also eaten – most notably in a thickened gerty-milk pudding called pillas-gerts.

Pillas-gerts (and gerty-milk) has fallen into history. No-one makes it any more. And Harriet has not yet been able to find anyone still alive who remembers how to make it. But there is a mention of it in a book called Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall written by William Bottrell in 1880. Harriet shared this with me and, of course, I immediately wanted to have a go at making it.

Making the ancestral Cornish pillas-gerts includes sprouting the ‘naked’ pillas oat grain. These days, standard oats cannot be sprouted (they’ve been heated to 100C to deactivate an enzyme in them that would cause them to otherwise go rancid). ‘Naked’ oat varieties, like pillas, have a paper-thin husk which is easier to remove. This means they don’t have to go through this treatment and can be spouted. I’ve not yet been able to get any pillas, the ancestral Cornish grain, but I do have access to another unprocessed ‘naked’ oat variety which is grown here in Italy by Silvia at Le Barbarighe.

Here’s how I tried to re-create pillas-gerts, a breakfast that was lost 200 years ago:

Stage 1 ‘Cheeney’ the oats.

The first step was to ‘cheeney’ the oats – which means to just sprout them. I soaked the oat groats for 24 hours and then left them to sprout for day.

Stage 2 – ‘Scroch’ the oats.

“Roastan of pillas es a very nice job, that but which few can be trusted to do; yet it’s worth all the labour.” Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, Bottrell, 1880

Once the oats are showing signs of sprouting, they were transferred to a slow fire where, being stirred all the time, they were dried and ‘scroched’ a little – that is, burnt.

Stage 3 – Grind the oats.

“[She] put a handful or two at a time into as pretty a little moorstone traff (trough) as ever eyes ded see and pound’n till crushed fine enow.” Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, Bottrell, 1880.

This is where, traditionally, a seashore pebble comes in. After roasting, the grains were cooled and then ground, a couple of handfuls at a time, in a stone trough using the local pebble. Not having a seashore pebble, I did this part in my stone mortar and pestle. My naked oats were completely unprocessed so this grinding detached the paper-like husk from the groat. I was left with a mixture of ground oats and whole husks. I sieved this mixture to remove the husks.

“You ought to see her beautiful little pillas-traff; et will only hold about a gallon; es as smooth as a basen inside and out; and es is so light that one can move ‘n about with ease.” Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, Bottrell, 1880.

Stage 4 – Thicken milk with the fresh oat flour.

The fresh oat flour was then used to thicken milk which would have, traditionally, been unpasteurised. I used a local source of raw goat milk. There are no details available on the ratio of flour to milk so I guessed – using 10g of flour to 85ml of milk.

The result was a thick, creamy, toasty-flavoured, sweet, pudding-like mix that was delicious. The flavour of the freshly-roasted whole oats was incredible. I agree with Bottrell when he says,

“The change made in the grain, the better, wed’nt be believed or anyone not acquainted weth it” Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, Bottrell, 1880

The creaminess of the milk complimented the toasty flavour very well and the sweetness of the milk also meant that the dish didn’t need further sweetening. It was a beautiful breakfast.

Pillas-gerts was a local, freshly-processed, hand-ground cereal. It would have been full of nutrients, actively connected eaters to the land that sustained them and also, as I now know, had a great flavour! The pelleted, fortified, exploded cereals sold by industrial giants whose products destroy our health are a poor comparison.

“They are too lazy now, and buy oatmeal from shops, or thicken their milk with barley flour; yet neither of them is half so good as the pillas-gerts that used to be grown by most everyone here who had a few acres of land.” Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, Bottrell, 1880.

Pillas was also used for other foods, particularly baked puddings – that’s my next experiment!

Harriet is currently masterminding trials of pillas-growing in the UK. 2023 will be the first harvest with grain that can be eaten. You can hear her talking about the grain and her work in this presentation titled ‘The Journey for a Lost Oat’ hosted by the Sheffield Wheat Experiment.

If you love oats and would like to take an another historic British oat dish; one that involves fermentation, check out my video course Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment

The Weston A. Price Foundation published my article So Much More Than Scottish Porridge: The Rich Culinary History of British Oats in the Winter 2023 edition of their journal Wise Traditions.

It is an exploratory dive into the wonderful legacy of cooking oats that the peoples of Scotland, Wales and Northern England (who survived on this grain) have passed to us and writing it fired me up: I’m currently working on a book highlighting this amazing legacy and bringing the recipes into a modern kitchen. Sign up to my newsletter here to receive insights from my research.

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