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Gruel, Oatmeal
Mix a table-spoonful of oatmeal with two of cold water. Stir it into a pint of boiling water, and in a quarter of an hour strain off for use. Season and flavour it according to taste. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1d. Sufficient for a pint of gruel.
A thin invalid's drink rather than a breakfast porridge, and the proportions make that clear: one tablespoon of meal to a pint of water. Nothing here is difficult, but the texture depends entirely on how the meal is added.
- Slake the meal firstThe two spoonfuls of cold water are the hinge of the recipe. Oatmeal tipped dry into boiling water clumps instantly; wetted to a slurry first, it disperses and thickens smoothly.
- Which oatmealThe book says only 'oatmeal', which in the period would have meant ground oats rather than the rolled oats of a modern packet. Rolled or instant oats tend to thicken faster and give a slimier body, and are likely to overcook in fifteen minutes; steel-cut (pinhead) or a fine oatmeal is probably the closer match.
- A pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 570 ml. Using a US pint of 16 oz gives a noticeably thicker gruel from the same spoonful of meal.
- Fifteen minutes is shortThat is enough for a thin, strained liquid but not enough to soften whole pinhead oats through. Since the solids are strained out and discarded, this does not matter here — the point is to extract starch, not cook grain.
- StrainingPush it through a fine sieve rather than a colander, and press the meal against the mesh to get the starch out. What passes through should be the consistency of thin cream.
- Seasoning"According to taste" in a sickroom context meant salt, or sugar with a little nutmeg, lemon peel or a spoonful of cream. Wine or brandy was often added for adults; treat that as optional.
- YieldOne pint, as the recipe states. It gives no serving count, though a pint would amount to a full tumbler or a large cupful.
Gruel belongs to the nineteenth-century sickroom rather than the breakfast table, and it sits alongside beef tea and barley water as one of the standard liquid foods for invalids, infants and convalescents, cheap enough that the costing comes to a single penny. The distinction between gruel and porridge is one of proportion and straining — porridge is meal cooked until it is a solid food, gruel is meal used to give body and a little nourishment to water, then strained clear of its grain. Oats were an obvious base in Britain because they were cheap and long associated with Scottish and northern cooking. The dish carries a certain Victorian gloom by association, Oliver Twist's workhouse being fed on it, but the medical logic was sound enough for the period: something warm, bland and swallowable for a patient who could manage nothing else.