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Gruel for Invalids
Put a pint of water on the stove and as it heats stir in two tablespoons of oatmeal and a pinch of salt. When the gruel is well boiled, break an egg into a bowl and beat it light with enough sugar to sweeten it; pour the boiling gruel on the egg and sugar, and beat hard. A wineglass of sherry may be added if desired. - Mrs Sarah N. Mc- Candless, Pittsburg.
A thin oatmeal drink enriched with egg at the end — closer to a hot beverage than porridge. The whole point is that it stays pourable, so resist the urge to add more oatmeal.
- The hinge: temper, don't scramblePour the boiling gruel onto the beaten egg in a thin stream while beating hard, not the egg into the pot. Add it the other way around and you get threads of cooked egg suspended in cloudy liquid.
- A wineglassIn this period a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup. That is a substantial dose of sherry in a single serving, and the recipe treats it as optional ("if desired").
- Which oatmeal"Oatmeal" at this date may mean either coarse- or steel-cut oats or the rolled oats already widely sold; the recipe does not say. Cut oats need something like 25 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer to give up their starch, while rolled oats will do the job in about 10 minutes and yield a slightly slimmer, less silky gruel.
- "Well boiled"Judge by texture rather than the clock: the liquid should be faintly thickened and opaque, coating a spoon like thin cream. Two tablespoons of oatmeal to a pint of water is deliberately weak, and it will reduce as it cooks, so top up with hot water if it tightens.
- StrainingSome invalid gruels of this period were strained through a fine sieve before the egg went in, leaving only the starchy liquid. This recipe does not say to, but straining is what keeps the result a drink rather than a cereal.
- Raw eggA pint of boiling gruel poured over one egg will bring most of it well past 160F, but the heating is uneven and not measurable. If you are actually serving someone unwell, elderly or very young, use a pasteurized egg.
- YieldSomewhere between one and two cupfuls depending on how much liquid boils away, so one or two sickroom servings. It thickens considerably as it cools and does not reheat well, so make it to order.
Gruel occupies a specific place in nineteenth-century domestic medicine: it was the first thing given after a fever broke, when the patient could take liquid but nothing solid, and it appears in nearly every American and British household manual of the period in a dozen variations — water gruel, milk gruel, arrowroot gruel, cornmeal gruel. The egg-and-sugar finish here is the standard upgrade for a patient thought to need building up, and it is essentially the same operation as a caudle or an eggnog, both of which were also considered medicine rather than treats. The sherry is prescription, not indulgence: alcohol was a mainstream stimulant in the pharmacopoeia well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks of this era pour it into invalid dishes without a word of justification.