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Some Kitchen Kinks: Gruel
Oatmeal Gruel.-1/4 cupful of oatmeal; 1/4 quart of cold water; 1 teaspoonful of salt. Cook in a double boiler two hours.
Press through a strainer, dilute with cream, reheat, and serve. The wellbeaten white of 1 egg or a few tablespoonfuls of thick cream stirred into the gruel adds nutrition.
Cornmeal Gruel.-2 tablespoonfuls of cornmeal; 1 tablespoonful of flour; 1 teaspoonful of salt; 1 cupful of cold water; 3 cupfuls of boiling hot water or milk.
Mix meal, flour, and salt; stir into the mixture enough cold milk or water to make a thin paste, and pour this into the hot milk or water. If water is used, cook one hour in a saucepan; if milk, three hours in a double boiler. Serve hot, diluted with cream.
Egg Gruel.-1 egg; 1 teaspoonful of sugar; 1 cupful of hot milk (not scalded); nutmeg or lemon juice to flavor.
While the milk heats, beat the yolk of the egg till thick and light colored, the white till stiff. Stir into the yolk the other ingredients in the following order: sugar, milk, beaten white, and flavoring.
Eggnog.-1 egg; 2 teaspoonfuls of sugar; 1½ tablespoonfuls of lemon juice; 1 or 2 tablespoonfuls of wine; nutmeg.
Beat the yolk till thoroughly foamy; stir in the other ingredients.
Nutmeg may be omitted.
Lemon Whey.-1 pint of hot milk (not scalded); juice of 2 lemons.
Add the lemon juice to the milk; when the latter has curdled, strain it through cloth. Serve the whey hot or cold in a glass.
Toast Water. 1 slice of stale bread; 2 cupfuls of boiling water; 1 slice of lemon.
Have bread-inch thick, toast brown, pour upon it boiling water, cover closely and cool; strain it. A slice of lemon may be added.
Barley Water.-2 ounces of pearl barley; 3 cupfuls of water.
Wash barley in cold water, boil twenty minutes in a covered dish; strain, sweeten, and add lemon, if permitted.
Apple Water.-6 sour apples; 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar; 1 quart of boiling water.
Slice apples, add sugar and boiling water. Cover closely and cool; strain.
Bran Tea.-2 cupfuls of bran; 1 quart of boiling water.
Steep bran in water for an hour; strain, and season to taste.
Lemonade.-1 lemon; 1 tablespoonful of sugar.
Squeeze lemon, add sugar, mix with ice water and strain; rub the rim of the glass with a slice of lemon peel and allow it to float.
This is a page of sickroom cookery — thin, bland, easily swallowed preparations for invalids — and two of the eleven items are built on raw egg served to exactly the people least able to withstand a foodborne illness. The grain waters and gruels are still perfectly good; the egg dishes are not.
- Egg Gruel and Eggnog: raw egg, deliberatelyEgg Gruel calls for milk that is explicitly not scalded, stirred into a beaten raw yolk, with raw beaten white added after. The Eggnog has no milk at all: a beaten raw egg with sugar, lemon juice and a tablespoon or two of wine. Nothing here approaches the 160F at which Salmonella in egg is reliably killed, and the wine does nothing at that dilution. These were fed to the sick, the elderly and children — the groups at highest risk. If you want either drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Lemon Whey is also unheated dairyLemon Whey is dairy that never gets properly hot -- A pint of milk heated but pointedly not scalded, curdled with lemon juice and strained. With pasteurised milk this is unremarkable; with raw milk it is not, and unpasteurised milk was still common when the book was written.
- The oatmeal gruel wants steel-cut oatsThe oatmeal gruel probably wants steel-cut oats -- "Oatmeal" in a book of this vintage often means coarse or steel-cut meal rather than rolled flakes, though rolled oats were on sale by then too. Steel-cut gives the smooth, strainable liquid the recipe expects. Starting from a quart of water, the strained yield before dilution is somewhere under that.
- Cornmeal gruel timingsAn hour in a saucepan with water, three hours in a double boiler with milk. The long milk cooking is not fussiness — direct heat scorches milk and cornmeal together very quickly. Stir the cold paste into the hot liquid off the boil to avoid lumps, then set it over water.
- Barley water: pearl barley, 2 ouncesTwo ounces is a scant third of a cup. Twenty minutes of boiling in three cups of water leaves the barley firm and the liquid faintly starchy; that is correct. Longer simmering makes it cloudy and gluey.
- Bran teaBran steeped an hour in a quart of boiling water, then strained. It is a mildly nutty infusion, not a fibre drink — the bran itself stays in the strainer.
- "If permitted"The phrase in the barley water instruction is not a flourish. These preparations were made under a doctor's orders, and lemon, sugar and cream were each things the attending physician might rule out. It marks the page as nursing, not cooking.
- Toast waterStale bread toasted genuinely brown — not pale — is the whole flavour of the drink. Pouring boiling water over pale toast gives you warm bread water and nothing else.
Gruels, whey, toast water and barley water belong to the long tradition of invalid cookery, which commonly occupied a chapter in English and American household manuals from the eighteenth century into the 1920s. Before intravenous fluids and commercial nutritional supplements, feeding a fever patient meant coaxing calories and liquid into someone who could not chew and might not keep much down, and the answer tended to follow a broad pattern of thin preparations: clear waters first, then grain gruels, then gruel enriched with cream or egg, then solid food. Barley water is the oldest of them, prescribed in Hippocratic writings as ptisane and still sold in Britain today as a soft drink; toast water and apple water were among the sickroom substitutes for plain water, which nineteenth-century households often had good reason to distrust. Egg beaten raw into milk or wine was regarded well into the twentieth century as concentrated nourishment for the wasting patient — the same logic that put raw eggs in bodybuilders' glasses much later, and the same logic that public health guidance eventually overturned.