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Arrowroot, Nourishing, for Invalids and Sick Children
Boil half an ounce of hartshorn shavings and a little lemon-rind in a pint of water for fifteen minutes; strain, and pour the liquid upon two dessert-spoonfuls of arrowroot which has been previously mixed with a little cold water. Stir briskly, and boil for a few minutes; then add a tea-spoonful of sugar and a glass of wine. Probable cost, 3d. per pint, without the wine. Sufficient for one person. Time to boil the shavings, a quarter of an hour.
A Victorian sickroom gruel: arrowroot thickened in a broth of hartshorn shavings, sweetened and fortified with wine. The hartshorn is the one ingredient that no longer exists in commerce, and the recipe works without it.
- Hartshorn shavingsTurnings of deer antler, boiled to extract gelatine — the Victorian equivalent of a collagen broth, sold by chemists as an invalid restorative. It has long since dropped out of the grocery and pharmacy trade; a teaspoon of powdered gelatine bloomed in the strained liquid gives the same body, or omit it and accept a thinner result.
- ArrowrootGenuine West Indian arrowroot starch, not cornstarch. It sets to a clear, almost translucent gel with a clean flavour, part of why it was favoured for invalid cookery. Modern packets labelled arrowroot are often the genuine article, but check the ingredients, as tapioca or potato starch is sometimes sold under the name.
- Slaking the starchThe hinge of the recipe. Arrowroot must be smoothed to a thin paste with cold water before the hot liquid goes in, or it seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will disperse.
- Do not overboilArrowroot reaches full thickness almost at once and then thins again if held at a boil — unlike flour, it breaks down quickly. Bring it just to a boil, stir until it clears and thickens, and take it off. "A few minutes" is generous.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, so two dessert-spoonfuls comes to roughly four teaspoons, a little over a tablespoon — enough to thicken 20 oz of liquid to a pourable gruel. A "glass of wine" in this period is generally taken as a wine glass of about 2 fl oz, most likely a fortified wine.
- Lemon-rindPare it thinly with no white pith, which turns bitter over a quarter-hour boil. It is the only real flavouring in the dish besides the wine.
- YieldAbout a pint, served as a single invalid's portion, as the recipe states. Two smaller cups is more realistic now.
- The wineFortified wine added at the end is not cooked off, so the alcohol remains. Leave it out for children, whatever the title says.
Arrowroot occupies a whole cluster of entries in Victorian cookery books because it was the standard invalid food of the nineteenth century: bland, easily digested, quick to prepare, and thought suitable when nothing else would stay down. Hartshorn shavings — literally shavings from a hart's antler — had long been a pharmacy staple, often said to date back to the middle ages, boiled for a gelatinous jelly credited with restorative and cooling properties; by the time Cassell's was compiled they were sliding out of use, displaced by cheaper commercial gelatine. The wine is not an indulgence but a period convention: alcohol was regarded as a stimulant and a proper part of a sickroom diet, and a great many "nourishing" preparations in books of this era end with a glass of sherry stirred in. The costing in pence per pint is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households where a sick child's diet had to be budgeted alongside everything else.