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Oatmeal Gruel
1/3 cup rolled oats 1 pint water 1 pint or more hot milk 1 1/4 teaspoons salt Add the salt to the water, and bring to a boil in the inner cup of a double boiler. Stir in the rolled oats. Boil over the fire two or three minutes, then set the inner cup in the outer cup of the double boiler which contains boiling water, and continue the cooking for three hours or longer. Then rub the oatmeal through a strainer. Add hot milk to make of the proper consistency for gruel.
Barley gruel, cornmeal gruel, or rice gruel may be made by the same recipe, using one-third cup pearl barley, one-fourth cup cornmeal, or one-fourth cup rice, instead of the rolled oats. And in making cornmeal or rice gruel one hour's cooking of the cereal is sufficient. It may be necessary to cook the barley four or five hours.
It may sometimes be desirable to make the gruel entirely of water.
A sickroom gruel: cereal cooked to collapse, pushed through a strainer, then thinned with hot milk. The long cooking is the whole point, but it can be shortened considerably with modern rolled oats.
- The double boiler"Inner cup" and "outer cup" mean the insert and the water pan. Any heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water does the same job; the water must stay at a simmer for the full time, so top it up as it evaporates.
- Cooking timeThree hours suited the coarser oats of the period. Modern quick or standard rolled oats break down in 20 to 40 minutes over water and gain little from longer cooking. Judge by texture: the grain should be soft enough to give way under the back of a spoon.
- SaltOne and a quarter teaspoons works out to roughly soup-strength seasoning once the pint of water and pint of milk are both counted. If that is more than you want, particularly for someone unwell, start with less and adjust at the end.
- StrainingA fine mesh sieve and a flexible spatula or the back of a ladle work better than a spoon. What passes through is the gruel; the bran and coarse residue left behind are discarded. A blender does not substitute, since it puts that residue back in.
- ConsistencyGruel is meant to be drunk, not eaten with a spoon: roughly the body of heavy cream. Add the hot milk gradually off the heat, and expect to need at least the pint specified, sometimes half again as much.
- The grain variationsPearl barley in the amounts given is slow and needs the longest cooking; the recipe itself allows four or five hours. Cornmeal at a quarter cup thickens fast and is best stirred in gradually to avoid lumps. Rice gives the blandest result.
- YieldAbout three to four cups once thinned, or two to three servings. Gruel separates on standing, so whisk it again before serving and reheat gently rather than boiling.
Gruel belongs to the vanished tradition of invalid cookery, a distinct branch of household cooking with its own chapters in nineteenth and early twentieth century manuals. Before intravenous fluids and commercial nutritional drinks, a thin strained cereal in milk was what you gave a patient who could not manage solid food: warm, mild, easy to swallow, and free of the bran and husk thought to irritate a sick stomach. That is why this recipe insists on the sieve and on hours of gentle cooking rather than a brisk boil, and why it offers barley, cornmeal and rice as interchangeable bases, so a nurse could vary the diet without varying the method. Barley water and barley gruel in particular are generally traced back through centuries of European medical writing as a standard convalescent drink. The closing line, that the gruel may be made entirely of water, quietly acknowledges the patient who could not tolerate milk at all.