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Entire Wheat Gruel
3 cups water (hot) salt Mix wheat and cold water, add boiling water and salt, and cook in double boiler one to two hours. Milk may be substituted for water.
A one-line invalid's gruel, printed so tersely that the key measurement has dropped out of the text. Everything else is straightforward double-boiler work.
- The missing quantityThe ingredient list gives 3 cups hot water and salt but no amount of wheat. Comparable gruels of the period tend to use a few tablespoons of meal to 3 cups of liquid; the original as printed does not tell you, and any figure here is a reconstruction rather than the book's. The amount of cold water for the slurry is missing too.
- "Entire wheat"Entire wheat meant flour or meal milled from the whole grain, keeping most of the bran and germ, as against the white flour of the day. Whole wheat farina or a coarse whole wheat cereal meal is the nearest current equivalent; fine whole wheat flour will give a pastier result.
- Why the cold water firstSlurrying the meal in cold water before the boiling water goes in is the whole technique. Meal tipped straight into hot liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring in a double boiler will break up.
- Double boiler, and why so longAn hour to two hours over simmering water sounds excessive but the vessel never exceeds boiling point, so nothing scorches and the bran softens. In a heavy saucepan over direct low heat the same gruel is done in 20 to 30 minutes with regular stirring, though it needs watching.
- Water levelTwo hours will boil a double boiler dry. Check the lower pan and top it up with hot water as needed.
- The milk versionSubstituting milk gives a richer, sweeter gruel, and milk gruels were common in sickroom cookery. Milk in the top of a double boiler is far less likely to catch, which is part of why the method was specified.
- Salt and finishingNo amount is given; about a quarter teaspoon for 3 cups suits most palates. Gruel was often served plain, or with a little sugar, cream, or a spoonful of preserve stirred in at the table.
- YieldTwo to three cups of thin gruel, depending on how much cold water goes into the slurry and how much cooks away; one or two small servings.
Gruel is an old form of cereal cookery in English — grain and liquid, cooked long and thin — and by the time this book appeared it survived chiefly in the sickroom, where thin, bland, sustaining food was the standard of nursing care. Its presence here reflects how comprehensive such volumes tried to be: alongside the confectionery and desserts came the whole domestic repertoire, invalid cookery included. "Entire wheat" was a mild health-reform word of the late nineteenth century, when whole-grain meals were promoted as more nourishing than the increasingly white, roller-milled flour that had taken over American baking. The double boiler was the fashionable vessel of the same decades, sold as the modern, scorch-proof way to cook cereals for hours without attention.