“Samuel Johnson called oats horse feed; Scotland made them a national staple.”
The Old English word ate named the oat plant, a grass that grew easily in the cold, wet soils of northern Europe. Melu named ground grain, the meal made from any cereal. By the 14th century these two words had fused into otmele in Middle English, a practical compound for a practical food. The combination described both the grinding and the product.
Oats were long considered inferior grain. The Romans barely noticed them. In medieval England they fed horses and the poor. Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary defined oat as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The Scottish took the observation in stride and kept eating.
The porridge spread north into Scotland and Ireland, where cold climate and thin soil made oats the staple crop. Porridge, from Old French potage, competed with oatmeal as the common name for the dish. By the 18th century, Scottish emigrants carried both the food and the word to North America, where oatmeal settled as the standard term.
The Quaker Oats Company registered their name in 1877, placing a Quaker on the cylinder as a symbol of honesty and simplicity. The cereal that Johnson mocked as horse feed became, in the 19th century, the moral food, associated with frugality, health, and early rising. The Old English compound survived every indignity.
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Today
Oatmeal is the most common breakfast grain in the English-speaking world, eaten by millions who know nothing of its route through medieval English kitchens and Scottish peat-smoke. The food is older than the word; people were boiling ground oats long before otmele appeared in any manuscript.
What the word carries, still, is the texture of necessity: these are the grains that fed people when nothing better grew, and that plainness is now sold as virtue. The oat asks no permission to nourish.
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