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Gruel of Patent Groats
Mix a table-spoonful of patent groats smoothly with two table-spoonfuls of cold water. Pour in a pint of boiling water, and stir for ten minutes, or more, over the fire. Sweeten and season, if desired. No straining is needed. A small lump of butter boiled with the gruel is an improvement, but in this, as well as the seasoning and flavouring, the taste of the invalid should be consulted. Sufficient for one person. Probable cost, 2d. per pint.
A single serving of invalid gruel, thin enough to drink from a cup. The whole thing hinges on slaking the meal in cold water first — added dry to boiling water it lumps instantly and no amount of stirring recovers it.
- Patent groatsA commercial product of the period: oat groats hulled and milled to a fine, almost flour-like powder, sold under brand names such as Robinson's. The nearest current equivalent is fine or superfine oatmeal, or rolled oats blitzed to powder in a spice grinder. Steel-cut oats will not work at this ratio or timing.
- The pintAn imperial pint, 20 fluid ounces or about 570 ml — a quarter more than a US pint. One tablespoon of meal to that much water gives a genuinely thin gruel, drinkable rather than spoonable.
- Why no strainingThe point of the patent product was that it was already fine enough to need no sieve, unlike coarse oatmeal gruel, which was strained through muslin. If you grind your own oats, expect to strain after all.
- Ten minutes minimumConstant stirring over direct heat for at least ten minutes cooks out the raw starch taste and thickens the gruel properly. Under-cooked gruel tastes chalky and separates in the cup.
- SeasoningPeriod practice ran to sugar, a little salt, nutmeg, lemon peel, or a spoonful of wine or brandy stirred in at the end. Salt alone does a surprising amount for it.
- CostTwopence per pint in pre-decimal money. The book gives a probable cost for its recipes as a matter of course; either way, the dish was a very cheap one.
- YieldOne pint, one person, one sitting. It thickens and skins over as it cools, so make it to order.
Gruel sits in the sickroom chapter of many a Victorian cookery book, and "patent groats" tells you why this version exists: by the middle of the nineteenth century, branded, pre-milled oat preparations were sold specifically to save households the labour of soaking and straining coarse oatmeal, and were marketed hard for infants and invalids. Cassell's includes it because feeding the sick was considered a basic domestic skill rather than a speciality — thin gruel, beef tea, barley water and arrowroot were the standard repertoire for anyone confined to bed. The instruction to consult the taste of the invalid is characteristic of the genre: the food was assumed to be dull, and the cook's job was to make it tolerable to someone with no appetite. Gruel's grim literary reputation, largely earned in workhouse settings, has rather overshadowed the fact that it was also ordinary convalescent food in comfortable houses.