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Flour Porridge
Mix one ounce of flour with two table-spoonfuls of cold milk. Stir this gradually into a pint of boiling milk, adding half a tea-spoonful of salt. Boil gently for ten minutes, and serve with sugar or treacle. Probable cost, 6d.
A plain milk-thickened porridge of the invalid-cookery and nursery tradition. It comes together in under fifteen minutes, and the only thing that can spoil it is lumps.
- Quantities in modern termsOne ounce of flour is about 3 1/2 tablespoons, or a scant 1/4 cup measured lightly. An imperial pint of milk is 20 fl oz, so use 2 1/2 US cups rather than 2.
- The hinge: slake the flour properlyTwo tablespoons of cold milk is barely enough to make a smooth paste with an ounce of flour. Work it to a lump-free slurry with a spoon before it goes anywhere near heat, adding a splash more cold milk if it stays crumbly, and pour it into the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in a pint reads high to a modern palate on a sweetened porridge. A quarter teaspoon is closer to current taste, and can be adjusted at the table.
- Boil gently, and mean itMilk thickened with flour scorches on the bottom of the pan the moment it is left alone. Use a heavy saucepan over low heat and stir more or less continuously for the full ten minutes; the time is needed to cook out the raw-flour taste, not just to thicken.
- TreacleBlack treacle is the closest British product; outside the UK, unsulphured molasses is the usual substitute, and golden syrup gives a milder, lighter result.
- YieldTwo small breakfast servings, or one substantial bowl. It thickens considerably as it cools and can be loosened with hot milk.
- Cost noteThe "probable cost, 6d." cannot be turned into a meaningful modern figure; read it simply as the book's own marker of how inexpensive the dish was.
Flour porridge belongs to the long British tradition of milk-and-grain pottages fed to children, convalescents and anyone whose digestion was thought to need coddling, and it doubles as a demonstration of a basic lesson: starch must be slaked in cold liquid before it meets boiling liquid, the same principle behind gravy, blancmange and every flour-thickened sauce. Wheat flour here stands in for the oatmeal, barley or arrowroot used in similar gruels. Cassell's cookery dictionaries, issued in the later nineteenth century, were aimed at households running on a fixed weekly budget, and the habit of printing a probable cost beside even a bowl of gruel tells you as much about its readers as the recipe does.