Proper Porridge with Salt

January mornings. The kitchen is cold before the kettle boils, and the windows are black at half six. This is when porridge makes sense. Not the instant sort, not the microwave sort, but real porridge: pinhead oats, water, salt, and twenty minutes of your attention while the rest of the house is still asleep.

There are three ingredients. That's it. Which means each one is doing all the work and there is nowhere for any of them to hide. The oats should be pinhead, coarse-cut, the kind that still look like grain rather than dust. The water should be fresh and cold. The salt should be good salt, added at the end, just enough to make the oats taste like themselves. Sugar is not invited. Honey is not invited. This is a savoury bowl. The Scots understood this centuries ago and they were right.

I make porridge most mornings from October through to March. The notebook has a single entry for it, written years ago: oats, water, salt, slow. I haven't needed to revise it. The ritual is the recipe. The spoon turning in the pan. The kitchen warming up. The smell of toasted grain filling the room before the sun is properly up. There are few better feelings than sitting down to a bowl of something hot that you made with your hands and nothing else.