My aunt's friend was driving along a lonely country road one dark rainy winter night when suddenly her headlights picked out another woman walking along the side of the road. She stopped the car and asked the woman if she was okay and the other woman said her car had broken down and asked for a lift to the nearest phone box. The two women set off again and my aunt's friend tried to strike up a conversation but quickly started to feel that she had picked up a very strange passenger. Then she noticed that the woman had really big hairy hands and wondered if this was actually a man dressed up as a woman and she started to panic a wee bit. But she kept her head and had an idea and so she stopped the car, dug out a rag and asked her passenger if she would mind nipping out to wipe the rear window. As soon as the stranger got out, my aunt's friend put her foot down and sped off. She drove for quite a while before she calmed down and then she realised that her passenger had left a handbag in the car. She stopped the car and reached over for the handbag. She wanted to see if there was any documentation or anything else inside which might shed light on the identity of this strange person, but when she opened the bag the first thing she found inside was a short handled axe.
This is not a true story. It didn't happen to my aunt's friend. And it didn't happen to any of the friends of aunt's, sisters or mothers of the people who told me the story. I've heard the same story, or variations on it - dark road, weird woman who might be a man and axe in the handbag - three times at very different periods in my life. This is an apocryphal story; one of the most widely told and most enduring of modern times. You may have heard it. And isn't that weird?
Here's another one, not quite as scary and probably not quite as well known, but it still might be doing the circuit of Scottish universities. It's usually told to freshers along with a count of how many people committed suicide the previous year by jumping off the hall of residence roof. This is the extremely condensed version, but you'll get the picture. It goes like this...
A young man goes to university and after a day or two decides that the best thing he can do with his grant/ allowance/ scholarship is spend as little of it as possible on food for the year and blow the major part on booze, hash, the union disco, etc. To this end he buys a big sack of porridge oats and cooks them all up at once then pours the porridge into drawers and leaves it to go cold and set. He takes his clothes out of the drawers first, or maybe hasn't put them in yet, depending on the version you're hearing. Anyway, the drawers are empty when he pours in the porridge and after it has gone cold and set, he tips up the drawers, out flops the porridge and he cuts it into squares and stashes them. I don't know why he doesn't just cook up a new batch of porridge every morning; maybe he wants to spend as much time on the razzle as possible and doesn't want to be troubled by such mundane tasks as having to make porridge, though, as I am hopefully going to demonstrate below, it is neither a difficult nor time-consuming process. But, it's not our story so we tell it as it is and what happens next is that he has a wee square of porridge every morning for breakfast and takes another with him for his lunch when he goes to his lectures..... and here I think we could be forgiven for giving into the compulsion to stop again, this time to ask ourselves, Would a man this desperate really go to lectures? But no matter, the story goes on and we are told that not only he does he have a dod of porridge for breakfast and lunch, but that he even slips a lump into his sky-rocket in case he gets the munchies in the pub around tea-time (that's Scottish dinner-time, by the way). I hope you're starting to get the connection here: apocryphal story about transvestite with axe in handbag leads to apocryphal story about student with porridge in drawer, which in turn leads to recipe about porridge. You figured that out, didn't you? But we still have to hear the end of the story, the twist in the tale. There always is one. That's what makes apocryphal stories so morbidly fascinating. If you've been to university in Scotland, you might have heard the ending, but here it is anyway: The poor boy got scurvey and had to be rescued by mum and dad. Probably got his bum skelped an' all.
So there it is. It wasn't really the super-condensed version, but when I started telling it I thought it would be. The only thing left now though, is to do the final link in this smooth and uncanny, perfectly logical transition from seemingly totally-unconnected-with-porridge story to porridge recipe and that involves only a few more steps. One of these, however, is rather important - certainly too important to leave out - and that is the topic of 'floating porridge'. Below, I give the ratio of water to porridge as between 1 to 1 and 2 to 1. Now if you use a 1 to 1 ratio you will get a pretty solid, heavy mixture that sticks to the sides of the bowl (and to the lining of your stomach). If, on the other hand, you go for the wetter ratio and cook it for slightly longer, you will end up with a mixture that, when left to set in the bowl for a few minutes, will float on the milk if it is poured gently on the side of the bowl, just above the edge of the porridge. Porridge is not boring.
Scottish porridge is usually cooked with salt, but Sveta likes sugar in her porridge so we cook it without salt or sugar and add our own when the porridge is in the bowl. I like to pour milk on the top and lift a spoonful of set porridge alongside a little milk. Sveta likes to stir the milk into her porridge.
Ingredients
1 cup of porridge oats
1 -2 cups of water
salt
Put the water in a pan and bring to the boil. Add the oats, stir and cook for a further 5 to 7 minutes. Add salt to taste and pour the porridge into a bowl. Leave it to cool for a bit before eating. It's dangerous stuff when hot. When it has cooled a little, pour a little cold milk onto your porridge and enjoy.