🎧 Why a spurtle makes a superior porridge stirrer

Episode summary: Here, for the New Year, is a confession and apology. I was completely wrong about porridge-stirring implements and I am here to make things right. In the episode about Porridge, I mocked the idea that the traditional Scottish spurtle, which to all intents and purposes is just a stick, might be better for stirring than a spoon. My (faulty) reasoning was that a spoon offered a greater surface area to break up lumps. In fact, as I now know, the stirrer does not break up the lumps directly. I noted in Eat This Newsletter 110 that a friend of a friend, who is a specialist in fluid dynamics, said that he had “a working, testable hypothesis”, which required only some worthy porridge in order to test it. So, I packed a bag of my favourite oats ready to meet up at Georgetown University in Washington DC. I should explain that Dr David A. Gagnon, the physicist in question, is the son-in-law of one of my dearest friends, who happened to be visiting when I was editing the episode. That was how David came to know of my…