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Caudle
Caudle is oatmeal gruel, sweetened, with ale, brandy, or wine added to it. It may be made in several ways. The simplest is the following. Mix a table-spoonful of oatmeal with a cupful of cold water. Pour a pint of boiling water or milk over it, return it to the saucepan, and let it boil for four or five minutes, stirring it all the time. Add wine, ale, or brandy, according to taste. Sweeten, and season with nutmeg or ginger. This will be thin caudle; if it is wanted thick, two table-spoonfuls of oatmeal must be used. Or, mix two table-spoonfuls of oatmeal in a pint of water. Let it stand one hour. Then strain, and boil it. Sweeten, and add wine, ale, or brandy, with seasoning to taste. Time to boil, twenty minutes. Caudle may be made with flour or ground rice instead of oatmeal. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. per pint, exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for one person.
A sickroom and childbed drink rather than a dish, and it stands or falls on the texture: smooth, pourable, barely thicker than cream. Everything else is seasoning to taste.
- Slake the meal firstThe cold-water mixing step is the hinge. Oatmeal tipped straight into boiling liquid will seize into lumps that no amount of stirring will break up. Mix it to a loose slurry cold, then pour the boiling liquid over it.
- The right oatmealThis means fine or medium ground oatmeal, not modern rolled oats. Rolled oats will not break down into a smooth gruel in four or five minutes and will leave flakes in the drink; fine oatmeal or a few pulses of oats in a spice grinder gets closer to the intended texture.
- The two methods differThe first cooks the meal and leaves it in, giving a gruel. The second steeps the meal for an hour, strains it, and boils only the starchy liquid for twenty minutes, which produces a smoother drink with no grain in it.
- How much wineThe book gives no quantity. A wineglass (about 2 fl oz) of wine or ale to the pint, or a tablespoon of brandy, is a reasonable starting point. Add it off the heat at the end.
- Sweetening and spiceOne to two teaspoons of sugar per pint is enough for a thin caudle; the wine brings its own sweetness. Grate the nutmeg fresh at the end rather than boiling it in.
- Thick versus thinOne tablespoon of oatmeal to a pint gives a drink; two gives something you take with a spoon. Made with milk rather than water it is noticeably richer and more likely to catch on the pan bottom, so keep the heat moderate and stir.
- Yield and costA pint, for one person, as stated. The "1 1/2d. per pint" is Victorian pricing and tells you only that this was among the cheapest things a household could put in front of a sick person.
Caudle is one of the old English warm spiced drinks that sat between food and medicine, and the name is generally traced through Old French chaudel to Latin calidus, warm. It belongs with posset and gruel in the sickroom and the lying-in chamber: caudle was traditionally offered to a woman after childbirth and to the visitors who came to see her, and dedicated two-handled caudle cups survive in English silver and pottery from the seventeenth century onward. By the time Cassell's was compiled the drink had shrunk to what you see here, an entry in the invalid-cookery repertoire alongside beef tea and barley water, cheap enough that no household could plead expense. The alcohol was not incidental; wine and ale were still widely regarded as restoratives, and a good deal of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery amounts to a way of getting sugar, starch and spirits into someone who cannot face solid food.