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Cracker Gruel
2 tablespoons cracker crumbs 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk Mix crumbs and milk and cook in double boiler twenty minutes; add salt and serve.
Dried bread crumbs may be substituted for cracker crumbs.
A sickroom gruel of the plainest kind, thickened only by soaked cracker. Two things need attention: the salt, and the fact that it must never touch direct heat.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks very high — a teaspoon of salt in one cup of milk is roughly 2,300 mg of sodium in a single serving, and it will taste harshly salty. Many invalid-cookery recipes of the period called instead for a saltspoon (about 1/4 teaspoon) or a few grains; season to taste at the end and start with a pinch.
- Double boiler, not a saucepanMilk thickened with starch scorches and skins over on direct heat, and the whole point of gruel is that it be bland. Water in the lower pan should be at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil.
- Twenty minutes is right hereTwenty minutes over water — the long, gentle cooking lets the cracker crumbs swell and soften into something smooth rather than gritty; stir occasionally to break up lumps.
- What "crackers" meantPlain soda or water crackers — unsalted or lightly salted, unseasoned, no butter flavor. Modern buttery round crackers will make it greasy and sweet. Unsalted saltines or dried plain bread crumbs are the closest match.
- YieldOne cup of milk makes a single serving, one invalid's portion, which is exactly what it was for. Double or triple as needed; the timing does not change much.
- Chafing dish caveatIf you make it in a chafing dish, use the hot-water pan, not the blazer set straight over the flame.
- ServingServe hot, thin enough to drink from a cup. It thickens considerably as it cools and can be loosened with a little more hot milk.
Gruels like this one belong to "invalid cookery," a fixed category in American and British household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, when nursing the sick happened at home and the cook was expected to produce a graded series of foods from thin liquids upward as a patient recovered. Cracker gruel, milk toast, beef tea, arrowroot and barley water all served the same purpose: warm, bland, easy to swallow, and requiring nothing of the digestion. The recipe comes from Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate firm, and best known for its chocolate and confectionery chapters. Water crackers are often described as a common pantry cracker of the era, hard, dry and durable, and they seem to have been used for thickening as well as for eating out of hand.<AUTHOR_ONLY>this recipe survives in the book mainly as a relic of that nursing tradition rather than as anything anyone chose to eat for pleasure.</AUTHOR_ONLY>