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MULLED BUTTERMILK
Put on good buttermilk, and when it boils, add the well-beaten yolk of an egg. Let boil up and serve. Or, stir into boiling buttermilk thickening made of cold buttermilk and flour. This is excellent for convalescing patients.
OAT-MEAL GRUEL-Put two heaping table-spoons oat-meal in one quart cold water, stir till it commences to boil, then cook one hour, stirring occasionally; do not let it scorch; season with salt, sugar, and any spice desired. For infants and very sick patients it must be strained, and not salted.
Two invalid-cookery preparations, both trivially simple and both dependent on details the original leaves out. The hinge in the buttermilk is heat management: boiled buttermilk separates, and a raw yolk dropped into boiling liquid scrambles.
- Buttermilk is not the same productThe book means the liquid left from churning butter, thinner than the modern cultured product though, since the cream was usually soured first, not necessarily much milder. Either way it curdles when boiled. Heat it gently to just below a simmer rather than following the instruction literally, and expect some graininess regardless.
- Temper the yolkWhisk a few spoonfuls of the hot buttermilk into the beaten yolk first, then return the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolk straight to boiling liquid, as written, gives you threads of cooked egg. The second "let boil up" should be no more than a brief return to heat; the yolk thickens at around 160-170F.
- The flour thickeningNo quantity is given. About a tablespoon of flour slaked smooth in a quarter cup of cold buttermilk will lightly thicken a pint. Cook it two or three minutes after it comes together or it will taste of raw flour.
- Quantity and yieldNeither version specifies volume. A pint of buttermilk with one yolk makes two invalid-sized servings of roughly a cup each.
- Which oatmeal"Oat-meal" here most likely means steel-cut or coarsely ground oats rather than rolled flakes, which were only beginning to appear in the 1870s; that would explain the hour of cooking. Rolled oats in the same proportion cook in well under half the time and will taste pasty after an hour.
- Two tablespoons to a quartThat is a very thin gruel by modern porridge standards, closer to a drink than a cereal, which is the point. It will reduce over the hour, by how much depends on the pan and the heat.
- StrainingFor the strained version, press the cooked gruel through a fine sieve rather than pouring it, or you lose most of the substance. The instruction to strain and withhold salt for infants and the very sick is a feeding convention of the period rather than a food-safety instruction.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a full section to "Food For The Sick," and these two entries are typical of nineteenth-century invalid cookery: bland, thin, warm, and built from whatever a farm kitchen already had. Buttermilk was a byproduct of butter-making rather than something bought, so it cost nothing, and its slight acidity and mild fermentation gave it a reputation — traditional rather than documented — as easy on a weak stomach. Oatmeal gruel had the older and better-established pedigree, appearing in British and American sickroom manuals throughout the century as the first food given to convalescents and to hand-fed infants; "gruel" simply means grain boiled long in a great deal of water. Both recipes reflect a period when nursing happened at home and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, decided what the patient ate.