Haute Meal - Irresistible Oats Create A New Cult Of Morning

Oatmeal has achieved unlikely cult status here. They dip out 300 bowls a morning, plus 50 take-out containers, even setting aside orders for stragglers who call ahead to reserve their fix.

There's a monthly flavor menu. If it's Monday, it may well be pumpkin (a crowd favorite); Tuesday, banana creme; Thursday, cinnamon peach, and so on, though the hands-down biggest seller is plain with traditional add-in options - walnuts, raisins or banana ($1.25 small plain, $2 tall).

God forbid they should run out. "Some days I could have this for breakfast, lunch and dinner," sings a lawyer fresh off the Paoli Local. "Everyone in my office is obsessed."

What has gone around has come around. Oats were for horses or the occasional stray Scot in 1870, Thomas Hine writes in The Total Package. Yet a mere 20 years later, boosted by new box-folding technology, nutrition claims, appeals to maternal duty, and recipes for rapid cooking, they were teed up to become the national breakfast cereal.

The broad-brimmed Quaker emblem, meant to signify purity, was the branding gimmick of a small Ohio miller, Henry Parsons Crowell, who took advantage of a fire at his competitor's far-larger mill in 1886 to gin up marketing and production.

Counterintuitively, as hot breakfasts have faded in the face of long commutes, over-scheduling and the grab-and-go bagel, oatmeal has been gaining ground, largely because of a latter-day health claim. The FDA certified three years ago that oatmeal's cholesterol-reducing fiber lowers risks of heart disease.

Last year, oatmeal sales again shot up, 9 percent.

Coventry didn't foresee the shift in food fashion when it added its designer oatmeal bar seven years ago, says Dan Rovner, the deli's founder. Now he regards himself as an oatmeal visionary. "We are," he says, grinning, "the Versace of oatmeal."

These are not fancy oats, cut a certain way, raised organically in Vermont, or packed in a handsome Irish tin. They are supermarket-variety Quaker Oats. Rovner scurries off to the storeroom and proudly produces one of the iconic cylindrical boxes.

But they sure taste different. It is a consistency beyond sweetly creamy, somewhere near gluey, and frankly very difficult - in the way of a children's pudding - to stop spooning down.

The difference between what you make at home and his, Rovner says, is five hours. You can make oatmeal in two minutes with boiling water. His stuff is simmered and simmered and simmered in 15-quart and 30-quart pots over a low burner half the night by Sammy Molina, the deli's longtime night cook.

All the while, Molina dolls it up, adding skim milk, brown sugar, vanilla extract, and for a few pots, the flavor du jour - peppermint? cranberry-nut?

It doesn't quite equal a mother's touch, nor is it quick cookery, but it otherwise hews to the oatmeal creed: It fills the belly, warms the heart, and steadies the nerves - long enough, at least, for the first cup of coffee to kick in.