Home › The Principles of Cookery › Water Gruel
Water Gruel
Ascertain whether it is desired that the gruel should be thick or thin. If it is preferred thick, mix two table-spoonfuls of oatmeal smoothly with a little cold water; if it is preferred thin, one table-spoonful of oatmeal will be sufficient. Boil a pint of water in saucepan, stir it gradually into the oatmeal in the basin, return the mixture to the saucepan, and boil it till smooth. Stir it well to keep it from burning, skim it, strain through a sieve, sweeten, season, or flavour it, and it will be ready for use. The gruel may be used after it has boiled five minutes. It will be better if boiled a quarter of an hour. Gruel may be sweetened and flavoured with nutmeg, ginger, or grated lemon, ale, wine, or spirit; or it may be seasoned with salt and pepper, and flavoured with spices, herbs, mushroom-powder, celery-seed, shallots, or onions. When sweetened with treacle, and taken just before getting into bed, it is one of the best suppers that can be partaken of by anyone who is suffering from a cold in the head or on the chest. It is most usually served with a small piece of butter dissolved in it, and either sweetened with sugar or seasoned with salt.
Gruel is thin oatmeal porridge, and the whole technique rests on slaking the meal in cold water before it meets heat. Get that right and the rest is seasoning.
- The hinge: cold-water slurryOatmeal dropped straight into boiling water tends to seize into lumps that are hard to stir out. Mix it smooth with a little cold water first, then pour the boiling water onto it in a thin stream while stirring.
- Which oatmealThe book most likely means pinhead or medium ground oatmeal rather than rolled oats. Rolled oats will work but give a softer, cloudier gruel that needs less cooking; steel-cut oats ground briefly in a spice mill are closer to the original.
- Proportions and yieldOne to two tablespoons of oatmeal to a pint (20 fl oz British, so about 2.5 US cups) of water. That is one generous invalid's serving, and it is deliberately thin — closer to a drink than a porridge.
- Cooking timeFive minutes is the minimum for the starch to swell; the quarter hour recommended here genuinely does taste better and removes the raw, chalky note. Stir often, as the low ratio of meal to water still catches on the bottom.
- StrainingSieving is part of what distinguishes gruel from porridge here. Press it through a fine mesh and discard the bran left behind, or skip the step if you would rather keep the texture.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means dark treacle or golden syrup depending on how strong a flavour is wanted; molasses is the nearest American equivalent for the dark kind.
- Mushroom-powderDried mushrooms ground to a powder, once a standard store-cupboard savoury seasoning. Dried porcini or shiitake blitzed in a grinder do the same job.
- The savoury versionSalt, pepper and a knob of butter make this a plausible light supper rather than a sickroom remedy. Onion or shallot is best simmered in the water from the start so it has time to soften, though the recipe as written adds flavourings after straining.
Water gruel is one of the oldest dishes in the English kitchen and one of the least glamorous — thin oatmeal in water, the food of infants, invalids, prisoners and the workhouse, and by Cassell's day a byword for meagreness. Its place in The Principles of Cookery is instructive: gruel is about as simple a demonstration as one could ask of how starch behaves in liquid. The long list of flavourings reflects a period when gruel was still a genuine sickroom staple in ordinary households, dosed with wine or spirit for strength and with treacle for coughs — remedies traditional rather than medical. Oatmeal held this role in Britain because it was cheap, kept well, and could be cooked to a consistency an ill person could swallow; the same reasoning put barley water and beef tea on the same tray.