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Cream Gluten Mush
1 pint milk or thin cream 1/2 cup gluten meal 3/4 teaspoon salt Heat the milk in a double boiler. Stir in the gluten, and cook in the double boiler till thick.
A plain hot cereal from the health-reform kitchen, thickened with wheat gluten rather than starch. The whole dish turns on what "gluten meal" meant when this was written, which is not what the bag on the shelf today contains.
- Gluten meal is not vital wheat glutenPeriod gluten meal was a wheat flour with much of the starch washed out. Its protein content varied a great deal from brand to brand, and it behaved like a coarse, slightly gritty flour. Modern vital wheat gluten runs about 75-80 percent protein and will seize into rubbery strands in hot milk. If you want to approximate the original, use a high-protein flour or a farina, not vital wheat gluten straight from the bag.
- Not gluten-freeThe name misleads a modern reader. This is a concentrated wheat protein dish and is entirely unsuitable for anyone with celiac disease or wheat allergy.
- The double boiler is the pointGluten meal scorches and clumps over direct heat. Set the upper pan over gently simmering, not boiling, water. The recipe says only to cook until thick; a further spell of gentle cooking will help take the raw flour taste out.
- Add the meal off the boilAdd the meal gradually -- Heat the milk until it steams, then sift or sprinkle the gluten in while whisking steadily. Adding half a cup all at once invites lumps that are hard to work out later.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups; "thin cream" in this period means roughly what is sold as half-and-half or light cream. The 3/4 teaspoon salt is generous for 2 cups of liquid but correct for an otherwise unsweetened cereal.
- Yield and servingMakes two modest breakfast portions. The recipe gives no serving directions; mushes of this kind were generally eaten hot, and a leftover mush set firm in a pan can be sliced and pan-browned.
Gluten meal, gluten flour and gluten bread run all through American health-reform cookery of the 1890s and 1900s, much of it coming out of the vegetarian sanitarium kitchens associated with Battle Creek, Michigan. The reasoning of the day held that starch was the troublesome part of wheat, particularly for diabetics and dyspeptics, so millers and sanitarium food companies sold flours from which some of the starch had been washed away, leaving a protein-rich residue. Doctors prescribed gluten gruels and mushes as invalid food, and cookbooks of the sort that carried titles about good food and how to prepare it printed them alongside ordinary oatmeal. The irony is not lost on a present-day reader: a product marketed for delicate digestions was concentrated wheat gluten, the very thing a portion of those patients were most likely reacting to, since celiac disease would not be linked to wheat until the 1940s.