The Power Of Porridge

From wooden spurtles to family tables, oats are a grain woven into Scottish life and legend

- ALLY HEATHER

I WAS embarrassed. I've been running group history tours all summer for visitors from England, Asia and America, and for the first three months they didn't have one nice bowl of porridge between them.

"I thought Scotland was supposed to be the porridge place?" remarked Louise, a Londoner, after yet another bowl of terrible runny, flavourless hotel porridge.

Louise had a point: Scotland is known for its porridge. We host the World Porridge Championship every year, for example.

In response to the slaggings that Scottish porridge was getting from my guests, I went off down a rabbit hole to learn how Scotland and porridge became so intertwined.

Historian Alasdair Moffat explains in one of his books how important porridge is to our national story. As the ice sheets receded north 8,000 years ago, the hairier animals migrated north with them: the mammoth, the reindeer, the sabre-toothed tiger. And on their tails came our earliest ancestors: hunters and gatherers who trapped, killed, cooked and foraged in this unfamiliar land.

Because the diet was harsh, women were much less fertile and had to breastfeed for longer before weaning their bairns onto berries, roots, nuts and meats. The population was low and unable to grow.