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Corn Meal Gruel
2 tablespoons corn meal + teaspoon salt Mix corn meal, salt and milk; add boiling water. and cook in double boiler two hours. ½ cup milk 2 cups boiling water
A thin invalid gruel, the sort of thing kept in the sickroom chapter of most turn-of-the-century books. It is barely more than cornmeal thinned to drinking consistency, and the long cooking is the whole point.
- Corn mealRead this as fine yellow or white cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising. A fine grind will hydrate fully and give the smooth, almost drinkable texture a gruel is meant to have.
- The salt quantityThe amount of salt has not survived legibly in this printing; only 'teaspoon salt' is readable. A quarter teaspoon for two tablespoons of meal is a safe guess. The recipe mixes the salt in at the start, but you may prefer to hold it back and season at the end.
- Mix cold, then add hotThe hinge of the method: slurry the meal with the cold half cup of milk before the boiling water goes in. Cornmeal dropped straight into hot liquid seizes into lumps that two hours of cooking will not dissolve.
- Two hours in a double boilerNot an exaggeration. Gentle indirect heat over that span breaks the starch down completely and removes the raw, chalky taste; the water in the lower pan will need topping up at least once.
- Chafing dish or stovetopDouble boiler -- Any bowl or saucepan set over simmering water does the same work, and a modern stovetop holds the gentle heat more steadily than a spirit lamp.
- ConsistencyIt will thicken as it cooks and again as it cools. Thin with hot milk or water to the pouring consistency you want before serving.
- YieldTwo and a half cups of liquid go in and a double boiler evaporates little, so expect something close to two cups, or one to two servings. Gruels of this kind were often sweetened or served with cream, though this one specifies nothing beyond salt.
Gruel occupies a corner of nearly every nineteenth-century American cookbook, filed with beef tea, barley water and arrowroot pudding as food for the sick, the very young and the very old, when digestion was thought to need coddling and long cooking was believed to do part of the stomach's work. Cornmeal was the cheap and widely available American grain for it, where an English book of the same date would more often reach for oatmeal.