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Arrowroot, to Prepare
Mix a dessert-spoonful of arrowroot with a little cold water. Pour on it, very gradually, half a pint of water boiled with a little lemon-rind; stir it briskly, and boil for a few minutes. Sweeten it, and add a little sherry or port wine. For infants, a drop of cinnamon-water, or of the essence of caraway-seeds, may be put in. Fresh milk may be substituted for the water, when the wine may be omitted. If there is any fear that the milk is in the slightest degree adulterated, it will be much better to use condensed milk, if for invalids. In that case no sugar will be required. Probable cost, 2d. per pint without the wine. Sufficient for one person.
A sickroom gruel of the plainest kind, and one that stands or falls on how long it is cooked. Arrowroot is not cornflour and does not behave like it.
- Do not boil it for minutesArrowroot thickens the moment it reaches simmering point and then begins to break down, thinning and turning stringy with continued heat. Bring it just to the boil, stir until it clears and thickens, and take it off — thirty seconds to a minute, not "a few minutes".
- The measuresA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. Half a pint in this British book is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups, so the ratio is thin by design: this is a drink, not a pudding.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe cold-water mixing is the whole technique. Arrowroot dropped dry into hot liquid seizes into lumps that will not disperse. Pour the hot liquid onto the paste in a thin stream while stirring, not the reverse.
- Lemon rindPare the zest only, in strips, and steep it in the water as it heats; the white pith turns the drink bitter. Fish the strips out before combining with the arrowroot.
- Condensed milkThe tinned condensed milk sold for household use in this period was usually sweetened, which is presumably why the recipe drops the sugar when it is used. Modern evaporated milk is not sweetened, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
- Not for infantsIgnore the infant instructions entirely. Sherry and port have no place in anything given to a child, and the same is true of the caraway and cinnamon waters, which were dosed by the drop and varied considerably in strength.
- YieldOne serving, as stated, of about a large cupful. It sets a little on standing and can be taken warm from a cup or with a spoon.
Arrowroot is the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, a West Indian plant, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it was one of the standard articles of what British cookery books called invalid or sick-room cookery — food judged bland, light and easily digested for the feverish, the convalescent and the very young. The anxious aside about adulterated milk is the most datable thing on the page. Watering, chalking and thickening of town milk were a live public scandal in Victorian Britain, and tinned condensed milk was promoted as a safer alternative for the sick, on the grounds that it came sealed and unmeddled with. The wine, likewise, reflects a medical orthodoxy of the day in which a little port or sherry was considered strengthening; it fell out of sick-room use as that thinking did.