Food for All: Oats

Just about my favorite breakfast is oatmeal. Steel-cut oats cooked on the stove with sorghum, raisins, black walnuts and maybe an apple mixed in. Add a pat of butter and a few sprinkles of salt for that little extra. I make up a batch on the weekend and then warm up servings throughout the week.

When you think of oatmeal, you probably think Scotland. In fact, oats have been a major crop in Scotland since Roman soldiers brought them along to feed their horses. The growing climate in Scotland, with its cool moist summers and long summer daylight turned out to be ideal for growing oats. A particular kitchen implement called a spurtle was developed to stir the porridge. Basically, a wooden rod, the spurtle kept the oatmeal from clumping while it was being cooked.  Along with their porridge or oatmeal, the Scots made oat cakes or bannocks out of the oats. These could be carried on travel or just eaten later in the day. They also had a drawer in the family dresser with a special lining. Leftover breakfast porridge was poured in and allowed to congeal. At suppertime, the congealed block of porridge was sliced and served at supper.  

Oats (Avena sativa) have been feeding people and livestock for thousands of years. The crop evolved from crossbreeding several types of wild grasses back in the “Fertile Crescent” over 4,000 years ago. By the bronze age, oats were found throughout Europe. They grew particularly well in cooler northern climates. For a long time, oats were considered to be a weed, growing with wheat and barley. Roman thinkers like Pliny believed oats were a diseased form of wheat instead of a separate species. When oats were intentionally grown, they were generally considered food for livestock and poor people. Because oats don’t contain much gluten, they don’t stick together enough to make bread and were relegated to the porridge pot. Over the centuries, more uses of oats as human food evolved, including haggis, black pudding, and a fermented concoction called sowans.

In the Middle Ages, oats were called “haver.” Although the word has fallen by the wayside, it still clings to “haversack” referring to a feed bag for a horse. Oats were used to brew beer during the middle ages as well.

According to legend, the first oats were brought to the New World by a sea captain who planted them on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. At any rate, they were part of the seeds brought by colonists in the 1600s and later.

When farmers first broke the prairies and began farming in Iowa. They primarily raised wheat, corn and potatoes. Wheat was sent to the mills to be ground into flour, corn was fed to the livestock, and farmers ate a lot of potatoes. By 1900, when the Dammeiers were farming here, they were most likely growing corn, oats and hay, all intended to feed their horses, hogs and dairy herd. Today, Iowa is fifth in the nation for oat production behind the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Oats is a cool-season annual grass and is planted either in the fall or early in the spring. Either way the seeds germinate when the soil temperature exceeds 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The plants grow two to four feet tall on hollow stems. The leaves are long and narrow and pointed. They’re rough on both sides, and are located near the top of the plant. The plant might have three stems, and at the top of each one is a loose collection of flowers called a panicle. The flowers grow on little spikes and are fertilized by wind-borne pollen. The oat grains develop from the flowers. The oats are ready to harvest by mid to late summer.

Each oat seed is loosely enclosed in a hull. The seed itself, called a groat, is the part we eat. For my steel-cut breakfast oats, the hull is removed by milling, and then the groats are simply cut into smaller pieces. For rolled oats, instead of chopping them up, they are steamed and then put through rollers to squeeze and flatten them. And, of course, for oat flour and oat milk, they are ground into a fine dust. Oats are high in protein and fiber as well as vitamins and minerals.

Oats have been put to other uses over the years. In the Middle Ages, they were used to brew beer. Even now they’re used in oatmeal baths to soothe itching. I remember my mother giving me an oatmeal bath once when I was little, in an effort to sooth a lot of chigger bites that I got sitting in the grass at a picnic. Oats are known for their moisturizing qualities so oat extracts are used in shampoos, moisturizers and cosmetics. At the other end of the spectrum, oat hulls are used as the source for a particular industrial solvent.

About 95 percent of the 3.2 million bushels of oats harvested in Iowa in 2022 went to animal feed. But Quaker Oats in Cedar Rapids still makes steel cut oatmeal for my breakfast.

Photo by Author. Alt text: Steel cut oats in a white glass dish shine in the afternoon sun. Cook ‘em. Yum.