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MILK PORRIDGE
Place on stove in skillet one pint new sweet milk and a very little pinch of salt; when it boils have ready sifted flour, and sprinkle with one hand into the boiling milk, stirring all the while with a spoon. Keep adding flour until it is about the consistency of thick molasses; eat warm with a little butter and sugar. This is excellent for children suffering with summer complaint. Or, mix the flour with a little cold milk until a smooth paste, and then stir into the boiled milk. Or, break an egg into the dry flour and rub it with the hands until it is all in fine crumbs (size of a grain of wheat), then stir this mixture into the boiling milk.
A plain flour-and-milk gruel from the invalid-cookery chapter, closer to a thin bechamel than to oatmeal porridge. The whole success of it lies in how the flour goes in.
- Sprinkle, do not dumpFlour shaken in a little at a time from the fingers, with constant stirring, is what keeps the porridge smooth. The two variants given at the end -- a cold-milk slurry, or flour rubbed with egg into crumbs -- are both lump-insurance, and the recipe offers them on equal footing with the sprinkling method.
- "New sweet milk"Fresh milk that has not begun to sour, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber a 19th-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the right modern equivalent; skim gives a thin, chalky result.
- SkilletHere it means a shallow pan on the stovetop, not a modern cast-iron fry pan by preference. Use a heavy saucepan and keep the heat moderate -- milk with flour in it scorches on the bottom quickly.
- Cook the flour outOnce it thickens, keep it at a bare simmer for a good three to five minutes, stirring. Flour pulled off the heat the moment it thickens tastes raw and pasty, and current food-safety guidance treats uncooked flour as a raw ingredient rather than a finished one.
- "Consistency of thick molasses"Pourable but coating -- thicker than pouring cream, nearer a thin custard. It sets up noticeably as it cools, so stop while it still runs off the spoon.
- The egg variantRubbing an egg into dry flour to wheat-grain crumbs makes what German-American cooks call rivels; they cook into small dumplings. Give this version a further five minutes of gentle simmering so the egg-bound crumbs are cooked through to the centre.
- YieldOne pint of milk makes two small invalid servings, or one generous bowl. It does not reheat well; the flour continues to swell and it turns to paste.
- "Summer complaint"A period term for the diarrhoeal illness common in children in hot weather. The claim of excellence for it is 1870s domestic medicine, not a recommendation -- treat this as a bland food, nothing more.
Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis and Ohio, 1877 onward) devotes a full section to "Food For The Sick," and milk porridge is the archetype of it: white, bland, thickened with flour, and cheap enough that any household could produce it at any hour. Flour-and-milk pap of this kind was fed to infants, convalescents and the elderly across Europe and America for centuries, long predating the book, and the theory behind it was that an irritated stomach wanted nothing sharp, sour, spiced or fibrous. "Summer complaint" -- the seasonal infant diarrhoea the recipe claims to relieve -- was one of the great killers of American children before milk pasteurisation and municipal water treatment, and it is a grim irony that unheated milk was often the cause. Boiling the milk here, done for texture rather than for hygiene, would have helped more than the flour did. The egg-and-flour crumb variant recalls the rivels stirred into soups by Pennsylvania and Ohio cooks of German descent, a population well represented among this book's contributors.