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PREPARED FLOUR FOR SUMMER COMPLAINT
Take a double handful of flour, tie up tightly in cloth and put in a kettle of boiling water, boil from three to six hours, take out, remove the cloth, and you will have a hard, round ball. Keep in a dry, cool place, and when wanted for use, prepare by placing some sweet milk (new always preferred) to boil, and grating into the milk from the ball enough to make it as thick as you desire, stirring it just before removing from the stove with a stick of cinnamon; this gives it a pleasant flavor; put a little salt into the milk. Very good for children having summer complaint.
Boiled flour ball is a genuine technique, not a curiosity: hours of boiling gelatinises and partly dextrinises the starch inside the cloth, leaving a dry core that grates to a fine powder and thickens milk smoothly without lumping. A few details need translating.
- How much flourA double handful is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of plain flour, about 8 1/2 to 10 1/2 oz. The exact amount matters little; the ball only needs to be big enough that the centre stays dry.
- The cloth and the tieUse unbleached muslin or a doubled square of cheesecloth, floured on the inside, and tie it very tightly with kitchen string. A slack tie lets water in and you get paste rather than a firm ball.
- Keep it covered with waterThree to six hours of boiling will drop the level considerably. Top up with boiling water so the ball stays submerged, and set it on a saucer or trivet in the pot so it does not scorch on the base.
- What you getAfter boiling, the outer layer turns to a wet grey paste; peel that away and discard it. The dry, chalky interior is what you grate, on the fine side of a box grater.
- Storage, honestly"A dry, cool place" meant a larder. The ball may still hold enough moisture to spoil if kept warm. Dry it thoroughly in a very low oven, 200F, and keep it in the refrigerator or freezer, or simply make a small one and use it within the week.
- Sweet milk and new milkSweet milk means fresh unsoured milk, that is, ordinary whole milk. "New" means straight from the cow that day; any whole milk will do.
- Proportion and cookingAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons of grated flour per cup of milk gives a pourable gruel; more makes a spoonable pap. Whisk it into the milk off the heat, then bring back to a simmer for two or three minutes so it thickens and loses any raw taste.
- SeasoningA pinch of salt per cup, and a cinnamon stick stirred through at the end rather than steeped, as the original directs. Ground cinnamon settles out and makes it gritty.
- A note on the medical claim"Summer complaint" was infantile diarrhoea, often fatal and frequently caused by contaminated milk. Gruel is a bland food, not a treatment; dehydration in a child is a matter for a doctor and oral rehydration solution.
"Summer complaint" was the nineteenth-century name for the wave of infant diarrhoea that arrived with hot weather, and it killed enormous numbers of city children before milk was routinely pasteurised and refrigerated. Household books of the 1870s and 1880s, Buckeye Cookery among them, carried sections of invalid cookery aimed at it, and boiled flour recurs in them as a binding food thought to be gentler than plain flour paste. The reasoning was partly sound even if the theory behind it was not: the long-boiled starch is already gelatinised and to some degree broken down, which is likely why grated boiled flour disperses in milk without lumping.