January is National Oatmeal Month for a reason — actually, for a couple of reasons. One, of course, is that the Whole Grains Council decided to name the month after this grain so it could sell more oats.
More importantly, to me, at any rate, oats and oatmeal offer a warm, comforting food when January winds are blowing. Oatmeal doesn’t literally stick to our ribs, but it certainly does so metaphorically, satisfying our appetites for at least a while.
Oats are an ancient crop. According to the Whole Grains Council:
“Exciting archaeological discoveries show oats were consumed by humans far before evidence of their domestication. In Italy, traces of wild oats were found on a tool resembling a pestle in a cave occupied by Paleolithic hunter gatherers approximately 32,000 years ago.
“Further East, in the Jordan valley, over 120,000 wild red oat seeds were found at an 11,000-year-old Neolithic era archaeological site.”
It took humans a while to domesticate oats, however. Even when oats were cultivated, they were often used exclusively for animals rather than people.
The 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined them as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” This was not meant to make Scottish people feel good about their diet.
Oats were grown in Europe and came to the Americas in 1602, when English privateer Bartholomew Gosnold planted the grass plant on an island off the coast of Massachusetts.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, oats and oatmeal took American kitchens by storm, along with other breakfast cereals.
In the early 20th century — starting in about 1910 — nutritionists discovered vitamins. This discovery was a boon for the oatmeal industry as oatmeal contains many B vitamins and other nutrients.
In recent decades, dietitians’ increasing emphasis on fiber and whole grains made oatmeal even hotter. (I couldn’t resist the pun!)
American oat production peaked in 1945 at 1.5 billion bushels, according to Washington State University. It has since declined as people have started to eat less cereal, hot cereal in particular. It dropped to under 40 million bushels in the 2020s.
The shutdown of 2020 found Americans staying at home and eating and cooking with oats a little bit more. In the past decade or so, oat milk has become a popular vegan substitute for cow’s milk … even if it has prompted comics to ask, “How do you milk an oat?”
Oats do not have the prominence they did 100 years ago, even if they do get a little more popular at the beginning of each calendar year.
The history of oatmeal cookies began with my own culinary idol, Fannie Merritt Farmer, who may have been adapting the traditional Scottish oatcake for American consumption in her “Boston Cooking School Cookbook” in 1896.
Her oatmeal-raisin cookies were the first published recipe of their type, although they were significantly less chewy than the oatmeal cookies we enjoy today.
In 1908, Quaker Oats put a recipe for Oat Cakes — again, cookies, more or less — on its oatmeal box. According to some sources, this was the first recipe to appear on a product box in the United States.
Quaker was also among the first companies to offer premiums to customers who sent in proofs of purchase and a little money. Health expert Audrey Watters writes:
“Early giveaways included a double-boiler for making oats, a crystal radio set (built in the cereal’s cardboard cylinder), and — get this — deeds to tiny parcels of land—”oatmeal lots” in Milford, Connecticut.”
These were tiny parcels of land that eventually drove the town of Milford’s tax collector crazy as people generally claim them or pay the property taxes due.
Back to oatmeal cookies: The recipe I am making this week is adapted from Quaker Oats. The company calls it “Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate-Chip Cookies.”
My main addition was the espresso powder, which gives this relatively ordinary (but still delicious) cookie a touch of depth and sophistication. If you don’t have espresso powder, use instant coffee (a tablespoon instead of 1-1/2 teaspoons to mimic the strength of the espresso) or leave out the coffee flavor. But it’s good!
Happy Oatmeal Month!
Oatmeal Chocolate-Chip Cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) sweet butter at room temperature
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoons espresso powder
1-3/4 cups flour
2-1/2 cups oats (I used regular, not steel cut or instant)
2 cups (12 ounces) semi-sweet chocolate chips
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter and the sugars. Beat in the eggs, 1 at a time. Beat in the vanilla, followed by the baking soda, the salt, and the espresso powder.
Turn your mixer to low and gently stir in the flour. Add the oats (again gently), followed by the chocolate chips.
Line cookie sheets with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Drop the dough in rounded tablespoons on the cookie sheets.
Bake the cookies for 9 minutes, until they are a golden brown. (If you bake them a minute or two longer, they will be crispier but still good.) Cool the cookies for 1 minute on the cookie sheets to allow them to firm up a bit; then move them to a wire rack. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.