ISSUE 76, OATS, Part 5: Oatmeal Triumphant
Oatmeal Triumphant
The old Yankee wits could always find humor in oatmeal. “It always appears as if it had been chewed and then allowed a vacation. Oat meal was born in Scotland, and has much of the steadiness and persistence of the Scotch character. It persists in beain oat meal under all circumstances.” All grain porridges are somewhat innocuous in taste. As the Yankee wit observed, “Oat meal mush is usually eaten with sugar, and milk or cream. The more of these you put with it the better it tastes, and the less like oat meal.” [“Oat Meal Mush,” New Hampshire Sentinel (September 3, 1884), 1.]
There were of course persons for whom the modesty of flavor of oatmeal seemed an evidence of it humble virtue. It was not gaudy, sweet, or exotic in shape or color as fruit was. In the 1870s the remnants of the Grahamite grain movement began to shift their approbation from whole wheat to oats: “Chemical analysis has shown that oat meal is richer than wheat in starch and the nitrogenous compounds, the first being fat forming and the latter flesh forming constituents.” [at Meal,” Boston Daily Journal (April 2, 1875), 2]. It rated higher than any other cereal grown in North America, and it could be grown in parts of North America farther north than other cereal crops.
The mid-1870s was the period when Oatmeal ceased being an ethnic dish of the Scots and won a mass following. An 1874 article tells the tale:
Commentators made clear that the sudden boom in oatmeal consumption was a city and town phenomenon; the hot bowl of oatmeal had not developed a following among country people [“Oat Meal,” New Jersey Daily State Gazette (May 23, 1881), 4].
Oatmeal is made from white oats, sometimes grey oats; black or dark colored oats were traditionally excluded during the cleaning, hulling, and rolling process. “Black oats, if even of good quality, give a bad appearance to the manufactured meal, as it re-appears in the form of black particles, which to the tidy housewife appears to be something much more uncleanly” [“How Oats are Made,” Northern Christian Advocate (October 23, 1884), 6]. In the late 20th century colored oat varieties entered the commodity stream for the first time.
In 1891 the oatmeal boom caused mill owners to considered how they might avoid cut-throat rivalry. They combined under the direction of one management, forming the Oat Trust. Chartered in Columbus, OH, The Consolidated Oat Company was capitalized for $3,500,000. The driving force behind this organization was millionaire miller Ferdinand Schumachar (1822-1908) of Akron, OH, who in the 1880s began being hailed as “The Oat King” in American newspapers.
Ferdinand Schumacher, The Oat King
The corporate combine that Schumacher engineered controlled production both for culinary oatmeal and the vast quantities of oats produced for horse feed. It took 6 years to fully organize, but by 1897 production quotas and price controls were instituted nationwide by the renamed the American Cereal Company. The new Company had a surprising time getting investors to buy stock. Shortly after Schumacher retired, a rival combine, the Great Western Cereal Company organized. When Quaker Oats Company purchased the Great Western Cereal Company in 1912, a Federal Grand Jury began looking into the deal as an illegal monopoly over breakfast oats.