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Gruel of Groats
To a tablespoonful of groats mixed with cold water, add a pint of hot water. Boil ten minutes.
A sick-room gruel of the plainest kind: one spoon of cereal to a pint of water, thin enough to drink from a cup. The only real decision is what you take "groats" to mean.
- What groats meant hereIn invalid cookery of this period "groats" often meant Embden or prepared groats — hulled oats crushed or ground fine, sold for gruel. Whole oat groats as sold today are intact kernels needing roughly three quarters of an hour or more to soften, and ten minutes will leave them raw. Steel-cut oats or coarse oatmeal are the closest common stand-ins.
- Mix cold firstThe instruction to slake the groats in cold water before the hot goes in is the hinge of the recipe. Cereal tipped straight into boiling water seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will break down.
- Quantity and yieldA tablespoon to a pint gives roughly a pint of very thin gruel — one or two invalid servings. It is meant to be sipped, not spooned.
- Boil means boilTen minutes at a genuine simmer with regular stirring, not a covered rest. The starch needs to burst and thicken, and at this dilution it will still look alarmingly thin while hot; it sets a little on cooling.
- StrainingPeriod sick-room instructions often direct pouring the finished gruel through a fine sieve or muslin to catch bran and any lumps. Worth doing if the point is a smooth drink.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Period sick-room gruels were commonly finished by the nurse with salt, sugar, a little milk or cream, or a spoonful of wine or brandy. Unseasoned it is close to tasteless.
- Make it freshGruel skins over, thickens and sours quickly. It was made in small quantities several times a day rather than held.
Gruel appears in many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manuals, filed with beef tea, barley water and arrowroot under nursery and sick-room cookery. Before the invalid diet was a medical question it was a domestic one, and the mistress of the house was expected to know how to produce a thin, warm, easily swallowed cereal drink for anyone too ill for solid food. Groats — hulled oats, from an Old English word for a fragment or particle — were a standard base in Britain and much of America, with "Embden groats" a commercial grade sold ready-crushed for this purpose. The dish carried a reputation for weakness that outlived its usefulness: Dickens and others used a bowl of gruel as shorthand for cheerless institutional food, and the association with workhouses and sickbeds may be part of why oat gruel disappeared from tables even as porridge stayed.