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CORN-MEAL GRUEL
Add to three pints boiling water two table-spoons cornmeal, stirred up with a little cold water; add a pinch of salt and cook twenty minutes. For very sick persons, let it settle, pour off the top, and give without other seasoning. For convalescents, toast a piece of bread nicely, and put in the gruel with one or two table-spoons sweet cream, a little sugar and ginger, or nutmeg and cinnamon. When a laxative diet is allowed this is very nourishing. Or, take a pint of meal, pour over it a quart or more of cold water, stir up, let settle a moment, and pour off the water; repeat this three times, then put the washed meal into three quarts of cold water, and place where it will boil; cook three hours, and when done add a pinch of salt. This is a very delicate way of cooking, and it may be eaten with or without other seasoning. This is an old and very valuable recipe, used thirty years ago by Dr. Davenport, of Milford Center, Ohio.
Two versions of the same invalid food: a quick twenty-minute gruel and a long-cooked, washed-meal version that takes three hours. Both are thin by design — this is a drink more than a porridge.
- Slake the meal firstThe hinge of the fast version is stirring the cornmeal into a little cold water before it meets the boiling water. Dry meal tipped into boiling liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of beating will fully break up.
- Cornmeal to usePlain fine or medium yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising, not masa harina, and not coarse polenta grind. Modern degerminated meal will work, though the period product would more often have been whole stone-ground meal; stone-ground will give a fuller flavour and settle out more solids.
- ProportionsThree pints is 6 cups, so two tablespoons of meal to 6 cups water is roughly a 1:48 ratio — extremely thin. The second method, a pint of meal to three quarts of water, is far thicker, closer to a loose porridge; the finished quantity will depend on how hard it simmers over the three hours.
- The three-hour versionUse a heavy pot over the lowest heat, or a double boiler, and stir every so often. Cornmeal at that dilution scorches on the bottom long before three hours are up, and a scorched gruel is undrinkable.
- Why the meal is washedRinsing the meal three times in cold water carries off the loose fines and some starch, which is what makes the result "delicate" — smoother, blander, less likely to taste raw or gritty.
- "Let it settle, pour off the top"For the very ill, only the thin liquid above the settled meal was served. A fine sieve or a few minutes' rest in a jug does the same job.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream — the term distinguished it from the cultured or turned cream common in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Any pouring cream works.
- Seasoning and servingToast added to hot gruel dissolves quickly; add it at the table if you want it to keep any texture. A pinch of salt is essential — unsalted cornmeal gruel tastes of nothing at all. Serve in a cup, hot.
- The medical claimTreat "very nourishing" and "laxative diet" as period opinion rather than instruction. Cornmeal gruel is mostly water and starch.
Gruel — a thin cereal drink of grain boiled in water or milk — was a staple of Anglo-American sick-room cookery, and many household manuals of the 1800s carry several versions: oatmeal, barley, arrowroot, rice, and in the American Midwest, corn. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Marysville, Ohio and published there in the 1870s; it includes a section on "Food For The Sick," reflecting an era in which nursing was largely a domestic skill and the invalid tray a household responsibility. The attribution to "Dr. Davenport, of Milford Center, Ohio" is characteristic of the book, which drew on contributions from Ohio housewives and correspondents, with some recipes printed with a name or place attached — lending a remedy the borrowed authority of a named local physician. The distinction the recipe draws between the very sick, who get the strained liquid alone, and convalescents, who are allowed toast, cream, sugar and spice, is consistent with the nineteenth-century convalescent progression from bland liquids to richer food as strength returned.