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Barley Gruel
The colour and taste of gruel is much improved by washing the seeds and throwing off the first water after it has boiled a few minutes. Boil three ounces of pearl barley in a pint of water for ten minutes, then throw it off and put to it two quarts of boiling water. When reduced one half it will be sufficiently boiled. Strain, add sugar, lemon-peel, or wine to taste, and simmer for a few minutes.
A barley water in all but name, from the invalid-cookery pages of the book. The method is sound; only the units and the vagueness about time need translating.
- The blanching step is the pointBoiling the barley ten minutes and discarding that water removes the dusty, chalky flour clinging to polished grains. Skip it and the gruel is cloudy grey with a raw-starch taste, which is exactly what the first sentence is warning against.
- QuantitiesThree ounces of pearl barley is about 85 g, a scant half cup. Cassell's is a British book, so the pint is 20 fl oz and the two quarts are 80 fl oz, roughly 2.3 litres. Reduced by half you finish with about a litre.
- TimingNo time is given for the main boil because the volume tells you when to stop. Expect an hour or more at a steady simmer, depending on how wide the pan is; a lid slows evaporation and stretches it considerably.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve and press the grains lightly with the back of a ladle to get the body without pushing pulp through. The strained barley is worth keeping for soup rather than discarding.
- Lemon peelPare the zest in strips with no white pith, and add it to the finished liquid for the last few minutes only. Boiled through the whole hour it turns bitter.
- WineSherry or Madeira would be a usual choice in invalid cookery of this kind; a tablespoon or two per glass is enough. Add it off the heat if you want the aroma to survive.
- Yield and servingAbout a litre, four servings. It thickens noticeably as it cools and can be thinned with boiling water; drink it warm, and refrigerate any remainder, as a starchy liquid like this sours within a day or two.
Gruel and barley water belong to the long tradition of invalid cookery. Barley boiled in water is closely related to the ptisan of classical medicine, the thin barley decoction described in the Hippocratic writings and still prescribed by nineteenth-century physicians for fevers and for irritation of the throat and bladder; the word survives in the French tisane. Pearl barley, hulled and polished until the grains are round and white, seems to have been the usual household form by the time Cassell's was compiled, and its coating of loose starch is the reason the book opens with the instruction to throw away the first water. Commercial bottled barley water is generally said to have come later, but into the twentieth century a cook in a sickroom was still expected to make it from the grain.