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Milk, Porridge or Rice Boilers
and cook the thin part, with constant stirring, until it has simmered from five to eight minutes. Season and flavor to taste.
Rice Water with Raisins. Take six ounces of rice, two ounces of raisins, and two quarts of water. Simmer for half an hour. Strain and add to the liquid two tablespoonfuls of good brandy. This is good for dysentery and diarrhœa.
Apple and Other Fruit Waters. -Slice unpared apples, pears, etc., and cook with water, until the fruit is quite tender. Strain through clean muslin. To be taken cold.
Three sick-room drinks, the first cut off mid-sentence by the page break — the fragment at the top belongs to a gruel or thin porridge finished in a double boiler. The two complete recipes below it are straightforward strained infusions, and both are more about the liquid than the solids.
- The opening fragmentThe text begins in the middle of an earlier entry; the page heading is "Milk, Porridge Or Rice Boilers," so the "thin part" is probably the looser portion of a gruel or milk porridge, simmered five to eight minutes with constant stirring. The fragment itself does not say what dish or what vessel. Read it as a tail end, not a recipe in itself.
- Weights, not cupsSix ounces of rice is by weight, close to a cup of long-grain rice. Two ounces of raisins is about 1/3 cup. Two quarts is 8 cups (about 1.9 litres).
- The hinge is the strainThe point of rice water is the starchy liquid, not the grain. Simmer covered so the water does not boil away, then strain and press the rice gently against the sieve to release the starch; discard the solids. You will get roughly a quart of cloudy liquid, thin enough to drink.
- The brandyTwo tablespoons of spirit was a common addition in sick-room recipes of this period, and has no place in anything given to a child or to a dehydrated patient. Leave it out; the drink is no less useful without it.
- Fruit watersThe fruit is left unpared, which does keep some aroma and colour from the skin. The recipe gives no quantities; about a pound of fruit to a quart of water works. Simmer until collapsing, then strain through damp muslin without forcing it if you want a clear liquid. Chill before serving, as directed.
- The medical claimsRice water is still used as a bland fluid during recovery from stomach upset, but dysentery and persistent diarrhoea are conditions for a doctor and for an oral rehydration solution, not for a home remedy. Treat these as mild drinks, not treatments.
- YieldThe rice water gives about four cups. The fruit water depends entirely on how much fruit and water you use, since the recipe specifies neither. Both keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator and should be discarded after that.
Rice water — eau de riz — is one of the oldest invalid drinks in the European domestic repertoire, and it belongs to a period when feeding the ill was a recognised branch of housekeeping rather than a medical matter. A late-Victorian household expected to nurse fevers, measles and "summer complaint" at home, and cookbooks supplied a graded ladder of foods from barley water and rice water up through gruels and beef tea to solid meals. The brandy is characteristic of the era: spirits were widely believed to be stimulating and astringent, and small doses were added to invalid drinks as a matter of course well into the twentieth century. The recipe's underlying instinct — replace lost fluid, offer something bland and starchy — is sound, and the same starchy liquid is still given during recovery from diarrhoeal illness in many parts of the world, though modern rehydration therapy adds the measured salt and sugar this version lacks.