Gluten Mush
1 pint water 2/3 cup gluten meal 3/4 teaspoon salt Stir the gluten into the boiling salted water and cook till thick.
A two-ingredient hot cereal from the era when high-protein "gluten" flours were sold as a diabetic and invalid food. The whole success of it lies in how the meal meets the water.
- What gluten meal wasA wheat flour with much of the starch washed out, sold under brand names by sanitarium food companies around 1900 and stocked as a diabetic staple. The closest current equivalent is vital wheat gluten, which is more concentrated still; high-gluten bread flour is milder and closer in behaviour but far starchier.
- Stir it in off the boilSlake it first -- Gluten hydrates and clumps quickly when it meets hot water. Slake the meal in a few tablespoons of cold water to a smooth cream, then pour that into the boiling salted water while whisking, or you are likely to get lumps that are hard to work out later.
- Cook time'Cook till thick' happens within a few minutes of stirring, though the mush can taste raw and pasty at that point. A longer, gentler cooking over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring often, improves it; on direct heat the bottom scorches easily.
- Quantities1 pint is 2 cups. As written this makes roughly two modest breakfast servings and it will stiffen considerably as it stands, so thin with hot water or milk if you are holding it.
- SaltThree-quarters of a teaspoon in two cups of water is on the salty side by modern porridge standards; gluten meal on its own is notably bland. Start at half and adjust.
- ServingBooks of this type served mush hot with milk or cream, or poured it into a wetted loaf pan, chilled it, then sliced and pan-browned the slices the next morning. The sliced-and-browned version is the better dish.
- Coeliac noteThis is close to pure wheat gluten. Whatever the original claims about invalid diet, it is the single worst possible food for anyone with coeliac disease or wheat allergy.
Gluten flours belong to the American health-food movement of the late nineteenth century, when sanitarium kitchens — Battle Creek chief among them — commercialised the long-known fact that washing the starch from wheat dough leaves a high-protein residue that could be dried and milled. Because it carried comparatively little starch, it was promoted for diabetics in the decades before insulin, when the main treatment on offer was severe restriction of carbohydrate, and it was also fed to convalescents as a bland, easily managed protein. Mush, meanwhile, was the standard American name for grain meal boiled in salted water, cornmeal most often, and the pattern here — boil, thicken, eat hot with milk or chill and fry in slices — is the same one applied to a novel commercial flour. The recipe's brevity suggests readers knew what mush was and needed only the proportions.