We always ate breakfast at the dining room table, a heavy mahogany affair with its eight chairs, upholstered in green leather. The chair at the end of the table, which was my father’s, had in addition, ornately carved wooden arms that denoted his status as head of the family. Breakfast was formal. We sat in our assigned places and waited for breakfast to be served. That particular meal was the province of my father. Breakfast was always porridge.
Porridge is a traditional dish in Scotland, and in our family my father was its author. He was not a great cook. What emanated from the kitchen on a daily basis varied from the unappetizing to the truly disgusting. I loathed porridge. Made from rolled oats, water and salt, it is cooked on low heat on the stove for about 25 minutes. The salt, for some bizarre reason, was added at the end of the cooking period. Or perhaps that was simply my father’s having forgotten to add it earlier, or forgotten that he had added it earlier. Porridge without salt is indescribably awful. It is not a great deal better with too much salt.
My father did not believe in measuring any of the ingredients in this dish (or in fact, any other dish that he prepared), so the resulting texture was unpredictable. On some mornings the porridge arrived thin, watery and either too salty or completely unsalted. Other days it had the consistency of glue. Sometimes it arrived with the appearance of lumpy wallpaper paste, if he had become distracted and forgotten to keep stirring. Then there were the days when he let it burn, again as a result of thinking about something else (that day’s lecture perhaps, as my father was a university professor). We ate it anyway. My father didn’t believe in waste.
No matter what the result of his cooking efforts, we were expected to eat our porridge, in silence, without complaint. I hated porridge. No amount of brown sugar or cream could compensate for the dreadful texture or taste of this dish. As I pushed the stuff around my bowl, trying to work up the courage to eat it, it grew colder and nastier by the minute. If you’ve ever eaten cold porridge you will understand. It was torture.
I don’t know for how long this state of affairs continued. Eventually, however, when I had gagged on mine for the umpteenth time, my father threw down his table napkin, glared at me, and said coldly, “Fine. You may leave the table”, in spite of the fact that most of my porridge remained uneaten.
My father continued to make porridge for his own breakfast, but he never served it to us again. Nothing was ever said, but from then on we had cold cereal or toast for breakfast. I believe that this was the only time in my life that I ever won a battle of wills with my father. And I still hate porridge.
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