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RICE GRUEL (Invalid Cookery)
Take a spoonful of ground rice, and with it thicken a pint of milk or water. Mix it in the same way as oatmeal gruel; boil with a bit of dried orange-peel or lemon-peel and a bit of cinnamon. Boil for about ten minutes, sweeten with loaf sugar, and add two glassfuls of port or one of brandy, as may be required. This is a good gruel for bowel complaints, but arrow-root is better.
A sick-room gruel of the sort every Victorian household manual carried. It comes together in about fifteen minutes, and the only real skill is keeping it smooth.
- The hinge: slake the rice first"Mix it in the same way as oatmeal gruel" means stirring the ground rice to a thin, lump-free paste with a little of the cold liquid before the rest goes in hot. Tipping dry starch into hot milk gives you lumps that no amount of boiling will cure.
- Ground riceNot the same as modern short-grain pudding rice. Ground rice is coarse rice flour, sold in Britain for puddings and shortbread; plain rice flour works and thickens slightly faster.
- A spoonful is vagueComparable gruel receipts tend to use something on the order of a tablespoon to a tablespoon and a half of starch to a pint of liquid, though the figure is an estimate rather than a stated standard. Start at a tablespoon; it will look thin off the heat and set as it cools.
- A pintThe book is British, so an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, about 570 ml. A US pint of 16 oz gives a noticeably thicker gruel from the same spoonful.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, once sold as a hard cone to be nipped off with sugar-cutters. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; sweeten to taste, a teaspoon or two.
- Ten minutes is the minimum, not a maximumTen minutes -- the recipe says "about ten minutes," and rice starch does want sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste, so err on the full time rather than cutting it short. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir; milk gruels catch and scorch on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- The peel and cinnamonDried citrus peel was a standing store-cupboard item; a strip of fresh pared zest, removed before serving, does the same job. Use a small piece of cinnamon stick rather than ground, which will cloud and grit the gruel.
- The spiritsA Victorian wine glass is usually reckoned at somewhere around 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so "two glassfuls of port" is in the region of half a cup of fortified wine in a pint of gruel (the recipe's alternative is a single glass of brandy) — a lot by current standards. The recipe gives it after the boiling, though it does not say whether the pan is off the heat. Leave it out entirely, or reduce it sharply, unless you want the drink rather than the invalid food.
- Yield and the medical claimOne pint makes one generous or two modest servings, taken warm in a cup. The recommendation for "bowel complaints" is nineteenth-century sick-room lore and should not be treated as advice; gruel is bland and warm, nothing more.
Invalid cookery was a standing department of Victorian household books, sitting alongside the roasts and entrées because feeding the sick fell to the same kitchen. Gruel — thin cereal cooked in milk or water — was its backbone: cheap, quickly made, digestible, and capable of being carried upstairs without ceremony. Rice was thought gentler on a disordered stomach than oats, which is why it appears here for "bowel complaints," and arrowroot, recommended in the last line as better still, was among the invalid starches in common use. The port or brandy reflects the period's settled faith in alcohol as a restorative for the weak, a conviction that survived in hospital practice well into the twentieth century. Cassell's, generally traced to the 1870s and said to have been reprinted in expanded form for decades, was aimed at exactly the household that would nurse its own sick at home rather than send them anywhere.