Oatmeal

The sweet, creamy flavour of oatmeal depends on Scotland’s favourable growing conditions: long, cool, moist summers allowing the oat grains to ripen slowly and grow fatter than they do in drier, hotter climates. Their suitability to the climate established oats as a staple grain and in the seventeenth century they began to take over from barley, which in most places became the brewing grain. Oatmeal contained valuable oil and was a richer source of nutrients. It was also more versatile, and could be milled into many different ‘cuts’, providing more interesting textures with ‘pinhead’, ‘coarse’ and ‘medium’ used in dishes such as haggis, porridge, brose and oatcakes.