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ARROWROOT CUSTARD
One table-spoon of arrowroot, one pint of milk, one egg, two table-spoons sugar; mix the arrowroot with a little of the cold milk; put the rest of milk on the fire and boil, and stir in the arrowroot and egg and sugar, well beaten together; scald and pour into cups to cool; any flavoring the invalid prefers may be added.
ČINNAMON TEA. -To a half-pint fresh, new milk add stick or ground cinnamon enough to flavor, and white sugar to taste; bring to boiling point, and take either warm or cold. Excellent for diarrhœa in adults or children. A few drops or a tea-spoon of brandy may be added, if the case demands.
Two sick-room preparations run together in one entry: a thin arrowroot custard and a cinnamon-milk drink. Both are simple, but the custard has a narrow window between set and ruined.
- The hinge: do not boil after the egg goes inArrowroot loses viscosity if held at a hard boil, and the egg will scramble. Stir the slurry and beaten egg into the hot milk, then hold it just below a simmer, stirring, until it coats the spoon — about 175F. "Scald" here means heat to just under boiling, not boil.
- Slurry first, alwaysArrowroot must be dispersed in cold milk before it meets heat or it will go lumpy. The wording is ambiguous, but it can be read as beating the egg and sugar in with that cold slurry, which dilutes the egg and makes curdling less likely.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups; the tablespoon of arrowroot is a scant 8-9 g. This yields a pourable custard, closer to a drinking custard than a baked one — three or four teacups, or two servings for a convalescent.
- Arrowroot vs. cornstarchArrowroot is still sold and behaves differently from cornstarch: it thickens at a lower temperature, sets clear rather than opaque, and breaks down with prolonged heat or re-boiling. It was preferred for the sick precisely because it was thought bland and easy to digest.
- Serving temperatureThe recipe says pour into cups to cool, and it does firm up slightly as it chills. It will not unmould — expect a soft, spoonable set.
- Flavoring"Any flavoring the invalid prefers" means vanilla, nutmeg, lemon zest or a spoon of sherry, added off the heat so it does not cook away.
- The cinnamon teaA half-pint of milk with cinnamon and sugar, brought to a boil. Stick cinnamon needs a few minutes of steeping to give up flavor; ground cinnamon will not dissolve and leaves grit, so strain it. Its reputation as a remedy for diarrhea rests on tradition rather than demonstrated effect, and the optional brandy should be left out for children.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a whole section to "Food for the Sick" because in the 1870s and 1880s nursing was done at home, and feeding an invalid was a cook's job rather than a nurse's. The prevailing theory held that illness left the digestion weak, so sick-room food was deliberately pale, soft and lightly flavored — gruels, beef tea, milk toast, arrowroot. Arrowroot itself is the starch of Maranta arundinacea, a tropical American rhizome imported chiefly from the West Indies, and it carried a reputation for delicacy that made it worth its considerable price; "arrowroot" is often said to come from indigenous use of the root as a poultice for poisoned arrow wounds, though the name may instead be a corruption of an Arawak word. The cinnamon tea that follows belongs to a different tradition, the household remedy passed between women, and the casual line about brandy "if the case demands" is a fair picture of how spirits functioned in a nineteenth-century medicine chest.