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Barley Gruel
1 tablespoon barley flour + cup cold water ½ cup boiling water ½ cup milk salt Mix barley with cold water and salt; add boiling water and cook in double boiler one half hour; add milk and cook ten minutes more; if too thick, thin with hot milk or cream. cup entire wheat cup cold water
A plain invalid's gruel, cooked over water so it cannot scorch. The text as printed has lost several fractions in transcription, so read the quantities with care.
- The missing fractionsWhere the original reads "+ cup cold water" and "cup entire wheat," a fraction has evidently dropped out of the type. For the barley, something on the order of ¼ cup cold water would be enough to slake 1 tablespoon of flour into a lump-free paste; the exact figure cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- The stray last line"cup entire wheat / cup cold water" appears to be the beginning of the next recipe in the book, which is not part of the barley version.
- Barley flourFinely milled barley flour, not pearl barley. It is still stocked by health-food shops and mills. The ratio here is lean because a gruel is meant to be a drinkable thin porridge rather than a thickened sauce.
- Slake before you heatThe hinge of the recipe: the flour must be smooth in cold water before any boiling water touches it. Add hot liquid to dry barley flour and you get permanent lumps that no amount of double-boiler time will dissolve.
- Double boilerAn upper pan set over simmering, not boiling, water. Thirty minutes sounds long for a tablespoon of flour, but the point is to cook the starch through gently so the gruel tastes clean rather than pasty.
- Adding the milkMilk goes in only at the end, for the last ten minutes; the recipe gives no reason for holding it back.
- YieldSomewhat over a cup of liquid goes in, so a single serving. Salt is the only seasoning given; the recipe mentions cream, but only as a means of thinning the finished gruel.
Gruels like this one belong to the long tradition of "invalid cookery," a common department in American and English cookbooks of the period between the 1850s and the First World War, when the sick were nursed at home for weeks and fed by the spoonful. Barley was the classic choice: barley water and barley gruel were prescribed for fevers, weak stomachs and infants well before there was any nutritional science behind the habit, and the practice is generally traced back through medieval and classical medicine, where barley decoctions were standard sickroom fare. The chafing dish was fashionable equipment around 1900, sold for late suppers and rarebits, but its gentle indirect heat also made it the natural device for cooking something at a bedside without a kitchen fire. That Lowney's, a chocolate company, printed the recipe at all shows how comprehensive these promotional cookbooks aimed to be.