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Rice and Barley Porridge
Take a quarter of a pound of rice, and a quarter of a pound of Scotch barley, and wash them thoroughly. Boil the rice and barley gently for three or four hours, with salt to taste, strain them off, and boil them up again in a little milk for a short time before they are wanted. It will often be found best to boil the barley for a couple of hours and then add the rice. This porridge may be eaten with milk, cream, sugar, or jam, and cold forms an agreeable adjunct to stewed fruit. Probable cost, 4d.
A plain nursery-and-invalid porridge of two grains cooked separately to different degrees of softness, then finished in milk. The instruction that matters is the staggered start: barley needs far longer than rice, and the recipe's own afterthought about adding the rice later is the version to follow.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound each is about 1/2 cup rice and 1/2 cup barley by volume. Together they yield roughly 4 to 6 servings of porridge.
- No water givenThe original assumes you know to cover the grains generously. Start with about 6 cups of water for the barley and top up as it absorbs; the grains should always be swimming.
- Scotch barleyThis is hulled or pot barley, the whole grain with only the outer husk removed, not the polished pearl barley on most shelves. Pot barley takes 60 to 90 minutes; pearl barley is done in 30 to 40 and will collapse if given three hours.
- TimingsThree or four hours belongs to a coal range with a permanent simmering spot. On a modern hob, give pot barley an hour, add the rice, and cook 25 to 30 minutes more until both are soft and the liquid is thick.
- RiceUse a starchy short or medium grain such as pudding rice or arborio; long-grain basmati stays too separate for this. Any modern rice needs 20 to 30 minutes at most.
- Straining and the milk finishStrain only to drain off surplus cooking water, not to rinse away the starch that gives body. Then warm the grains through in a little milk, a few minutes, without a hard boil, which scorches milk against the pan.
- Serving coldChilled, the mixture sets firm as the starch retrogrades. Loosen it with milk or cream before spooning it alongside stewed fruit, as suggested.
- Probable costFourpence was the ingredient cost when the book was compiled, a marker of how cheap grain porridge was rather than any guide to today's price.
Its double-grain construction is in keeping with nineteenth-century sickroom and nursery cookery, where barley was valued for producing a soft, bland, easily digested food; barley water and barley gruels appear throughout Victorian invalid-cookery chapters for the same reason. Barley was long a staple British porridge grain alongside oats. "Scotch barley" was a trade term for the coarser pot barley, milled less than pearl barley and generally cheaper for it. The suggestion to eat it cold with stewed fruit fits the household economy of the period, in which a pot of grain cooked on the range might be served hot at one meal and turned up again in a different guise at the next.