Home › The Nursery and Sick-Room › Oatmeal Gruel
Oatmeal Gruel
Stir two tablespoonfuls of oatmeal in a pint of cold water, and let it stand for some hours. Then, after stirring well, strain through a fine sieve,
A sick-room drink rather than a dish: cold-soaked oats, strained, and (as the sentence trails off in the original) boiled into a thin gruel. The instructions here are incomplete, so the finishing is left to the cook.
- The missing stepThe verbatim text breaks off after straining. Period versions of oatmeal gruel generally go on to simmer the strained liquid, stirring, until it thickens slightly; times given vary. Oat water that is not boiled will not thicken in the same way.
- What "oatmeal" meantIn a book of this period this would be coarse or medium ground oatmeal, or pinhead (steel-cut) oats — not rolled or instant flakes. Coarse meal gives up starch to cold water slowly, which is the point of the long soak; modern rolled oats behave differently.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups; two tablespoons of meal to a pint is deliberately thin, roughly a 1:16 ratio by volume. The result should coat a spoon barely, not stand up like porridge.
- The soak"Some hours" is left vague; overnight in the refrigerator is closer to safe practice than a day on the counter, since grain slurries at room temperature sour readily.
- StrainingA fine sieve, then press the residue with the back of a spoon to get the last of the starch. A layer of muslin in the sieve gives the smooth texture the sick-room recipes were after; the leftover bran can be discarded.
- SeasoningNo seasoning appears in the surviving text, which breaks off mid-sentence. A pinch of salt, and sugar, cream or a little milk stirred in after cooking, are common additions in invalid-cookery gruels.
- YieldSomewhat under a pint once strained and simmered, or two small servings. It thickens on standing and can be loosened with hot water.
Gruel belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery" — food for the sick, the very young and the convalescent, prepared to be thin, warm and nearly tasteless so that a weak stomach would accept it. Oats were the standard base in Britain and North America because oatmeal was cheap, kept well, and had a long reputation as a strengthening grain; barley water and arrowroot gruel filled the same role. The extreme simplicity of recipes like this one is not carelessness but doctrine: the medical advice of the period held that solids and seasonings taxed the digestion during fever. The cold soak and straining separate the starch from the bran, producing something closer to a drink than a porridge — which is why gruel became a byword for meagre fare long before it stopped being prescribed.