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Suet Porridge, for Invalids
Mince a table-spoonful of beef suet very fine. Mix two table-spoonfuls of flour with a tea-cupful of milk until smooth, then put it into saucepan. Add the suet and a pinch of salt. Boil very gently for ten minutes, and serve hot. This is recommended to invalids who cannot take cod-liver oil.
A one-portion invalid gruel: a milk-and-flour panada enriched with beef suet. It works, but the proportions and the short cooking time both need attention.
- The teacupfulA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug — usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter-pint and 6 fl oz, so roughly three-quarters of a US cup. Use that, not a 10 oz mug, or the porridge will be thin enough to drink through a straw.
- Suet, and what to buyFresh beef suet from a butcher is the intended article: hard kidney fat, which must be stripped of membrane and chopped or grated as finely as possible so it melts within the ten minutes. Packet shredded suet is coated with flour or rice flour, and vegetable suet is palm oil — either will work but neither is quite the same thing, and both already contain starch, so slacken the flour a little.
- Mix cold, then heatThe instruction to smooth the flour into the milk before it meets the pan is the hinge of the recipe. Slurry the flour with a few spoonfuls of cold milk first, then let down with the rest; flour tipped into warm milk lumps instantly and no amount of beating recovers it.
- Ten minutes is a minimumTwo tablespoons of flour in six ounces of milk needs a full ten minutes at a bare tremble to lose its raw, pasty taste, and it will thicken considerably in that time. Stir more or less continuously — milk starch catches on the bottom of a pan very readily. A heat diffuser or a double boiler removes the risk altogether.
- Season more than a pinchSuet and flour are both bland, and the dish is unsweetened. Salt to taste at the end rather than trusting the single pinch; a scrape of nutmeg turns up often in period invalid milk dishes and is worth having.
- Serve at once, and whyBeef suet melts at around 45–50°C, well above body heat, so it sets firm as the bowl cools and goes waxy and greasy on the tongue. Best made to order rather than reheated.
- YieldOne invalid's portion, roughly three-quarters of a cup, and a fairly rich one — the suet alone contributes over 100 calories of pure fat.
Invalid cookery was a standing department in Victorian household manuals; the assumption was that a sick person at home would be fed from the family kitchen rather than by a hospital, and that the cook needed a repertoire of bland, warm, calorie-dense things that could be got down an unwilling patient. The closing line is the point of the dish: cod-liver oil was the standard nineteenth-century restorative for consumptives, rickety children and the generally wasted, prized for being enormously fatty at a time when nobody yet knew about vitamins A and D — those were not identified until the 1910s and 1920s. It was also notoriously foul to swallow, and a great deal of ingenuity went into disguising or replacing it. Suet porridge is the replacement strategy at its plainest: if the patient will not take the fat by the spoonful, cook a spoonful of a different fat into something they will eat. Panadas of this kind — flour or bread boiled soft in milk — descend from a much older tradition of sops and gruels that predates any medical theory about them, and survived in nursery and sickroom use well into the twentieth century.