It was porridge of which I feel sure Burns would have approved, when he wrote the line, ‘halesome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food’.
The sense that porridge is a food of the poor is underlined in Stevenson's Kidnapped, where the miserly Ebenezer Balfour chows down on a bowl of oats, despite his huge wealth, exclaiming: ‘They're fine, halesome food - they're grand food, parritch.’
They're bonny fish and halesome farin'.
You are welcome, don't forget to buy me something halesome.
This was the British colonial linguistics in action, applying their term (to be specific, the Scottish term, for a food preparation that led Bobby Burns to wax rhapsodic on ‘the halesome parritch’) to a range of food preparations across Africa that had no direct analog in Europe.