Porridge

AWE prefers the spelling porridge (the one used in OED's headword) to either 'porage' (the spelling used by Scotts Porage Oats, and recorded from the 15th century) or 'porrage' (recorded between the 16th and 9th centuries).

Porridge is a dish eaten predominantly these days as a breakfast cereal, and made by cooking oats in water. (It was formerly a staple in northern parts of Europe, and was eaten at any time of the day.) In the English-speaking world, it is associated mostly with Scotland, where the habit is to cook it with salt and eat it with milk: many more luxurious versions are now made, without salt, with sugar or golden syrup or fruit, fresh or dried - or all of these. Traditionally in the Highlands of Scotland - whose pronunciation is sometimes mocked in the spelling 'parritch' - the dish was referred to in the plural, and they were eaten standing up, with the each eater dipping a spoonful of cooked porridge in a communal bowl of milk.

Porridge is also a slang term for a prison sentence - the criminal fraternity are said to talk of 'doing porridge', where academics might say 'serving a sentence'. A famous television serial comedy about prisoners in jail, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and starring Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale, was called Porridge for this reason. It ran from 1974 to 1977 on the BBC.