Boarding School Porridge
Late for work!
I was driving down the street in my rickety, twenty-year-old Honda, visor down to keep the glare from blinding me as I peered through the smudgy windshield. I hunched over a cold bowl of oatmeal using a plastic fork to spear congealed globs into my mouth. I laughed to myself at how pathetic it was.
My wife knows my deep and sincere loathing of porridge. Over the years she has tried to get me to like oatmeal by loading up each steaming bowl with butter and brown sugar. But to me, oatmeal is just another variation of the many porridges that I choked down in boarding school. Colorless, goopy sludge with weak flavor and even weaker texture. No thanks. (The image below is not an accurate picture of what we ate).
But this time she got me. She made an oatmeal bake! In my mind this was more akin to granola than porridge. So I agreed to forsake a bagel that morning for an oatmeal bake. And that’s where things went wrong that morning. Mornings in our home can sometimes be hectic wrangling the kids, getting breakfast ready and me heading out the door to work but add in potty-training and you never know what will happen. This time adding to the chaos was a potty-training accident (I’ll spare you the details) and it was all hands on deck. That meant a delay in me getting ready for work and a delay in getting the oatmeal in the oven (a costly error indeed). By the time the potty-training byproduct was put in its proper place I had to sprint for the door. My wife took the oatmeal out of the oven so I could have some breakfast. I slung a scoop into a bowl, grabbed a fork (why did I grab a fork!?) kissed my family: one, two, three, four and jumped in the CR-V.
So there I was, late for work, eating oatmeal removed from the oven early. The not so baked oatmeal was just oatmeal. I relived some suppressed memories of eating porridge at boarding school. I decided that over ten years without porridge was not long enough so here’s to the next decade and more without it in my life!
In boarding school, porridge was a common breakfast item, probably because you could make it in vast quantities to feed all the hungry kids on campus. We all filed into the dinning hall, stood behind the benches, prayed, then sat down and the first person to scoop the porridge had to break the skin that had formed on the top. You could either bust through it with the spoon and take some for yourself or fold it over and double the skin serving for someone else. You could load it with sugar or just wait for the men carrying the trays of toast to arrive. Breakfast was not the best meal each day, unless it was Saturday. Saturday was Indian breakfast! You could have south Indian dishes such as idli, dosa, upma, uttapam along side sambar, coconut chutney or aloo masala. It was enough to make teenagers get out of bed voluntarily on a Saturday morning.
There is much more to write about boarding school food. I will have to write more in the future, but I have to declare that one of the biggest cons of boarding school was that the best food was always served when the parents were visiting. We would complain of the food, then our parents would show up and we would see them taking seconds! Us kids could not believe the gas-lighting happening before our eyes.
I certainly did my share of complaining about the food. Nowadays, you share stories of the horrors of boarding school food with your siblings and other fellow victims and laugh. But the truth is that my thinking on this issue has changed a lot as an adult.
I am now thankful for it all.
The food certainly was not delicious all the time, but there was always enough for me to be full and have seconds. That’s much more than many other students my age in other parts of India were getting, and not that far away from our campus either. On top of that, I think of all the men who worked in that kitchen every single day to serve three meals and morning and afternoon tea. They cooked, set the table, served food throughout the mealtime, cleaned the dining hall, did the dishes and did it all over again. And again. And again. What good folks. What kind-hearted people to do that for so many years with a smile. I know I said thank you to them then but I wish I could see some of them again and give them a hug and a handshake and a sincere thank you for helping to care for me as a growing boy.
I know we just had Thanksgiving here in America, so I will add those men to the long list of things I can thank God for.
Until next time. Safe travels friends!
Seth
P.S. If you appreciate or enjoy the work I am doing at Marvelous India, feel free to say thank you by buying me a cup of chai!
