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Arrowroot Cup
Put one table-spoonful of arrowroot in a cup, mix with a tablespoonful of milk, put half a pint of milk in a saucepan and boil up; stir the mixed arrowroot into the boiling milk, add one tea-spoonful of sugar, and stir over the fire until it thickens. Serve in a small pie-dish, or cups, with a pinch of grated nutmeg on top.
An invalid-cookery standby: thickened milk, barely sweetened, meant to be swallowed easily. It comes together in under five minutes, and the only real risk is lumping.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml or just under a cup and a quarter. With a tablespoon of arrowroot this sets to a loose pouring custard rather than a spoonable pudding.
- Slake it properlyThe tablespoon of cold milk stirred into the arrowroot first is the hinge of the recipe. Skip it and the starch seizes into lumps the moment it meets boiling milk; the paste should be smooth and pourable before it goes in.
- Do not boil it after thickeningArrowroot thickens at just below boiling and then thins again if held at a rolling boil. Stir it in off the heat or on low, bring it back just to the point of thickening, and take it off.
- Arrowroot versus cornflourArrowroot is still sold, usually as a fine white powder in the baking aisle. It sets clearer and blander than cornstarch, and invalid cookery valued it for its reputed digestibility. Cornstarch will stand in, though not quite measure for measure -- it thickens a little less strongly, tastes chalkier and needs a longer cook.
- SweetnessOne teaspoon of sugar to half a pint is very restrained by modern palates. Two to three teaspoons brings it closer to a dessert without changing the texture.
- YieldOne serving, or two small cups. It thickens further as it cools and skins over, so serve it warm and covered if it must wait.
This belongs to the sickroom rather than the dinner table. Nineteenth-century household manuals devoted whole chapters to "invalid cookery" — beef tea, gruel, whey, calf's-foot jelly, arrowroot in milk or water — food judged light enough for someone with a fever or a weak stomach at a time when there was little else to offer them. Arrowroot, the starch extracted from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported chiefly from the West Indies, had a particular reputation for digestibility, and the name is traditionally explained as a reference to the root's use as a poultice for poisoned arrow wounds, though that etymology is disputed and may be a corruption of an Arawak word. Starch-thickened milk was in any case a basic technique: the same method underlies blancmange, sauce, and puddings of every kind.