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Bran Tea
*This is so good and nutritious it ought to be more widely used. Add one pint of boiling water to one-half pint of wheat bran. Let stand on the back of the stove for an hour, but do not boil. Strain and serve with sugar and cream same as coffee.
A sickroom drink from the invalid-cookery chapter: an infusion of wheat bran held hot but never boiled, then strained and drunk like coffee. It is simple, and the only real technique is temperature control.
- Do not let it boilBoiling extracts starch and bitter bran flavour and clouds the liquid into something closer to thin gruel. Hold it well below a simmer; "the back of the stove" on a coal or wood range simply meant the coolest part of the range top, with no fixed temperature. A covered pan in a very low oven, or a thermos, does the same job on a modern hob.
- The measurements are by volumeHalf a pint of wheat bran is one cup loose, which weighs only about 2 ounces because bran is so light. One pint of boiling water is two cups. Do not weigh out half a pound of bran by mistake.
- Bran goes rancidWheat bran contains some oil, and milled bran usually carries germ fragments with it, so it can turn stale and paint-like at room temperature over a few months. Buy it from a shop with turnover and keep it in the freezer; old bran will taint the tea.
- StrainingA fine sieve leaves a fair amount of grit. Line it with muslin or a coffee filter if you want a clean cup, and press the bran only lightly, since hard pressing pushes fine particles through.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of liquid after the bran absorbs its share, so one generous serving or two small ones. It does not keep well; make it fresh.
- On the nutrition claimThe book's assurance that the drink is nutritious reflects period thinking rather than analysis. What dissolves into the water is a little sugar, mineral matter and B vitamins; the fibre that makes bran valuable stays behind in the sieve. The sugar and cream supply most of the calories.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century household manuals, when a long convalescence at home was normal and the nurse was usually a family member working from the kitchen. The recipes are almost all thin, bland and liquid: beef tea, barley water, arrowroot gruel, toast water, and infusions like this one, all of them meant to be swallowed easily and to seem sustaining. Bran itself had a particular reputation in the period. Roller milling had made cheap white flour widely available, and reformers in the tradition of Sylvester Graham argued loudly that the discarded bran was the wholesome part of the wheat, so a bran preparation carried an aura of health that a cup of ordinary tea did not. Serving it "with sugar and cream same as coffee" also mattered: period sickroom advice tended to discourage coffee and strong tea for the sick, and a drink that looked and behaved like coffee at the invalid's tray was doing quiet psychological work as much as dietary work.