When is a bowl of porridge not a bowl of porridge? The moment it becomes the star of a lovingly crafted film about a Scottish cooking contest — and a sly metaphor for a nourishing retreat from the mania of modernity into the arms of community and human warmth and decency.
No, really, porridge does all that in The Golden Spurtle, a documentary about the World Porridge Making Championship. Set in the quaint Highlands village of Carrbridge, it follows eccentric contestants from around the globe as they attempt to capture the most exquisite combination possible of water, salt and untreated oatmeal to snag the coveted Golden Spurtle trophy.
“I’d just like to mention that I cook mine the Scottish way, which is with water,” says the Carrbridge stationmaster, Chris, early in the documentary, while staring into the camera. Soon an Australian contestant, Toby, frets: “I just don’t know if my porridge is good enough.” A former champion called Ian proudly announces: “Medium oatmeal, soaked overnight, and the salt goes in at the very end. That’s all there is to it.” Then the competition’s chief organiser, Charlie Miller, asks: “Why is there no monument to porridge in this land?”
"The pinnacle of porridge making is the holy trinity: water, oats and salt
The tone is often slightly tongue in cheek but always affectionate.
Carrbridge, the competition and the villagers are filmed by the 35-year-old Australian opera director Constantine Costi as if he’s capturing a fairytale milieu — like something, he says, from The Wind in the Willows. Costi is a “friend of a friend” of the film’s Aussie oatmeal enthusiast, Toby, so when he heard of the competition in 2022 he flew to Scotland, drove to Carrbridge and was instantly beguiled by the overwhelming sense of kind communal values among the mostly ageing populace (roughly 700-strong).
He knew immediately that he had to make a documentary here, he says, but one that did more than just chart the progress of the porridge contest.
“I’ve seen a million competition documentaries and they can be quite formulaic,” he says, referring to a genre that includes Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom and The King of Kong.
“Hopefully the joy of this film for audiences is that it’s part of that genre but it also takes it somewhere else.”
Charting the 2023 competition, Costi constructs his documentary like a Wes Anderson film, with lots of gorgeous, colourful and artfully designed frames featuring deadpan contestants delivering some standout and real-life one-liners that would sit comfortably in any Anderson screenplay. The former champion, Ian, fretting outside the venue, says: “I mean, I was into the martial arts big time. And now I’m standing here thinking about porridge.”
Costi says that he’s flattered by the Anderson comparisons (“a great, great director”), and though he was also influenced by Peter Greenaway and “lots of Bruegel paintings”, the point of the film was not about the look but the heart, as well as to show busy, bombarded contemporary audiences a quiet place that understands, even cherishes, the honour of simple pleasures.
“We’ve shown this film around the world, in everywhere from Sydney to Copenhagen, and the emotional response from the audience is always the same,” he says. “At a time of global chaos they seem to be connecting to the actual place in the film and to what it appears to offer, which is something that we want and potentially miss at the moment.”
And no, he doesn’t mean a bowl of porridge. Although he has refused to eat porridge since making the film.
“My problem is that I have eaten genuinely the best porridge in the world, you know? You can’t go back to a shitbox car when you’ve been driving Ferraris all day.”
We drift on to the subject of traditional rights and wrongs in the oatmeal game. Alongside the main Golden Spurtle competition is a section for “speciality recipes” with additional, say, smoked fish and spinach. Costi didn’t cover that in his film because he didn’t have the running time and, well, “it’s just less interesting when you can throw anything into it”.
I ask him for his opinion on my daily porridge fix, which includes golden linseeds, chia seeds, raisins and coconut oil, and he replies, smiling kindly, “The question is, when you start drowning it in so many different ingredients, when does it stop being porridge? Whereas the pinnacle of porridge making is really the holy trinity of those three ingredients — water, oats and salt.”
Costi also reveals, with a halfglazed look of ecstasy, that the best porridge he tasted while in Carrbridge was made by the competition finalist Nick Barnard, co-founder of the food company Rude Health. “When you taste porridge at that elite level it’s something more akin to risotto, where it doesn’t get that gluggy, pasty texture. There’s a bite to it, while it’s sitting in a kind of broth. It’s quite delicious.”
Costi, who is juggling two new films with a repertoire production of La bohème for Opera Australia, says that, underneath everything it suggests about porridge and quaint village life, The Golden Spurtle is really asking: “What happens when you do quit the rat race or when you retire? What’s at the heart of this film is the question of what will actually fulfil you. And, of course, there’s no real answer to that.”
The Golden Spurtle is in cinemas
Serves 2
Ingredients
1 cup oatmeal (jumbo oats)
2 cups oat milk (oat milk on oats! Exceptionally oaty!)
I cup raisins
1 tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp golden linseeds
1 tbsp chia seeds
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp rock salt
Method
Dump it all in a saucepan, bring it to the boil, simmer for 1 to 10 min depending on urgency, then eat.
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