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BOILED FLOUR OR FLOUR BALL
Take one quart good flour; tie in a pudding-bag so tightly as to make a solid mass; put into a pot of boiling water early in the morning, and let boil until bedtime; take out and let dry. In the morning, peel off and throw away the thin rind of dough, and, with a nutmeg-grater, grate down the hard dry mass into a powder. Of this from one to three tea-spoonfuls may be used, by first rubbing it into a paste with a little milk, then adding it to about a pint of milk, and, finally, by bringing the whole to just the boiling-point. Give through a nursing-bottle. For children who are costive use bran-meal or unbolted flour instead of white flour, preparing as above directed.
This is a nineteenth-century infant food, not a dish for the table: the finished powder is stirred into milk and given through a nursing bottle. It should be read as a historical document rather than followed.
- It is a substitute for infant formulaFlour and cow's milk supply starch, fat and protein but almost no iron, vitamin C or vitamin D in the forms an infant can use. Prolonged feeding on preparations of this kind was a recognised cause of infantile scurvy and rickets in the late nineteenth century.
- Unmodified cow's milkWhole cow's milk is not given as a drink to babies under twelve months. Its protein and mineral load strains immature kidneys and it is associated with occult intestinal blood loss and iron-deficiency anaemia in infancy.
- Bringing to "just the boiling-point" is not pasteurisationPasteurisation is a controlled time-and-temperature process; a brief heating in a home pan is not, and the milk of the period would generally have been raw. A bottle of warm starch-and-milk left standing is also an excellent growth medium for bacteria.
- Bran for a "costive" babyThe variant using bran-meal or unbolted flour to relieve constipation adds indigestible fibre and phytate to a diet already low in absorbable iron. Infant constipation is a matter for a clinician, not a change of flour.
- Fourteen hours of unattended boilingA full day's boiling -- The instruction is to start the pot early in the morning and boil until bedtime, twelve hours or more. That means a pot on continuous heat all day, needing topping up, with a scorch and fire risk if it runs dry.
- What the long boil was forWhat the long boil may have done -- Sustained wet heat gelatinises the starch at the core of the ball and probably breaks some of it into shorter, more soluble chains, which would help account for the dried mass grating down to a powder.
- If you need to feed an infantUse breast milk or a commercially prepared infant formula. Home-made formulas and gruels, including modern internet recipes, carry the same nutritional and microbiological problems this one does.
- The units, for readingA quart of flour is roughly 4 to 4½ cups by the loose scoop measure of the period; a pudding-bag is a floured cloth tied with twine, the same vessel used for boiled puddings.
Boiled flour ball is often said to have been one of the standard nursery preparations of the English-speaking nineteenth century, and it is generally traced to domestic manuals and medical writing on infant feeding before Buckeye Cookery, usually dated to 1877, collected it. Its reputation rested on two ideas: that long boiling made starch digestible to a stomach that could not manage raw flour, and that a starchy, binding food would check the summer diarrhoea that killed enormous numbers of bottle-fed babies before refrigeration and pasteurised milk. But the underlying problem was the milk supply, not the flour. Its reported place in the "Food For The Sick" chapter, alongside beef tea, arrowroot and barley water, shows how much of household cookery was still expected to double as medicine, in an era when a mother who could not nurse had few options and no reliable ones.