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Gruel, Effervescing
Mix a tea-spoonful of oatmeal to a smooth paste with a little cold water, then pour over it half a pint of boiling water, taking care that it is made thin enough to drink. Pour it into a tumbler, and just before drinking stir into it a pinch of bi-carbonate of soda and the strained juice of a lemon. Drink during effervescence. This is a very good drink for a feverish cold.
A sickroom drink from the invalid-cookery tradition: thin oat water made fizzy at the last moment with soda and lemon. Everything depends on drinking it while it is still working.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The recipe wants it thin enough to drink from a tumbler, so err on the generous side with the water.
- What "oatmeal" means hereVictorian oatmeal is stone-ground meal, fine or medium grind, not rolled oats. Rolled oats will not disperse into a smooth paste in cold water and will float in flakes; use fine oatmeal or a spoonful of oat flour.
- Boiling water is not cookingA teaspoon of meal scalded with a cup of boiling water gives you a starchy oat water rather than a cooked gruel, and it tastes faintly raw. Whisking the paste into water held at a simmer for two or three minutes, then cooling it to drinkable, gives a cleaner flavour.
- The pinch of sodaBi-carbonate of soda is plain baking soda, unchanged. A pinch means about ⅛ teaspoon; more than that and the drink turns soapy and salty before the lemon can neutralise it.
- The hinge: assemble in the glassSoda and lemon juice react on contact and the fizz is short-lived, so have the gruel already cool enough to drink and the lemon strained and waiting, then add soda, add juice, stir once and drink.
- TemperatureThe original is silent, but effervescence in a scalding tumbler is both undrinkable and wasteful. Lukewarm is the practical target.
- YieldOne tumbler, one serving. It does not keep — the starch sets and the fizz is a one-time event.
- On the medical claimA pleasant, hydrating drink for someone with a cold; not a treatment for one. Sodium bicarbonate is worth noting for anyone on a sodium-restricted diet.
Gruel — thin oatmeal or barley in water — was long a staple of English invalid cookery, valued because it was cheap, bland and could be got down a patient who would take nothing else, and cookery books of the period commonly give several versions. The effervescing version parallels a practice of the nineteenth-century chemist's shop, where soda and an acid (citric, tartaric, or lemon juice) were combined at the moment of drinking to produce an effervescing draught for fever and indigestion; the same reaction, dried and packaged, underlies the seidlitz powders and effervescent salts sold well into the twentieth century.