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Flour Ball for Flour Gruel
Knead two cups flour into a ball, adding water to form a stiff dough. Tie ball in a linen cloth and boil in deep saucepan ten to twelve hours, keeping the cloth covered with boiling water all of the time. Dry in cloth, remove cloth, and dry ball in oven. This will keep for years. Scrape two tablespoons from the ball; add one fourth cup cold water and two cups scalded milk; cook in double boiler ten minutes, add salt, and serve. 2 tablespoons oatmeal 2 cups boiling water
This is invalid cookery rather than a dish for the table: a ball of dough boiled until its starch is thoroughly cooked and dextrinized, dried hard, then grated a spoonful at a time into milk. Two cups of flour yields a ball that will supply many single servings.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingThe whole point is ten to twelve hours of uninterrupted boiling, with the cloth-wrapped ball kept fully submerged. Top up from a kettle of boiling water, never cold, or the outside of the ball slackens and the centre stays raw paste.
- The clothLinen or unbleached cotton, scalded and wrung out, tied loosely enough that the dough can swell a little but tightly enough that it holds its shape. A pudding cloth or a doubled square of muslin does the same job.
- Drying is not optionalAfter the boil the ball is dried in its cloth, unwrapped, and dried again in the oven. The recipe specifies no temperature, only 'dry ball in oven'; a low oven, with the door cropped open, until the ball is hard through, is the sensible reading. Any moisture left inside is what turns 'keeps for years' into mould.
- Storage, honestlyA completely dry starch ball is very stable, but the period claim of years assumes a cool dry larder and regular inspection. Keep it in a paper bag or open crock rather than sealed plastic, and discard it at any smell of must.
- ScrapingUse a rasp grater or the back of a knife on the hard surface. Two tablespoons of the scrapings, slaked first in a quarter cup of cold water so it does not lump, then stirred into two cups of scalded milk.
- The double boilerTen minutes over simmering water, stirred, gives a thin pourable gruel. Direct heat scorches milk at this thickness. Salt at the end; a little sugar is period-appropriate if it is being made for someone who will actually drink it.
- The stray last lineThe line '2 tablespoons oatmeal, 2 cups boiling water' is what the printed page gives, and our text reproduces it. It belongs with the oatmeal gruel that follows, not with the flour ball method; ignore it when working through the recipe above.
- Not infant foodFlour ball was given to infants in this period. Do not use it that way. Infants need a current formula; flour gruel supplies almost nothing but starch.
- YieldTwo cups of flour make a ball giving on the order of fifteen portions at two tablespoons each, and each portion is cooked with two cups of milk and a quarter cup of water.
Flour ball is a fixture of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, and it survived into general cookbooks like Lowney's because it solved a real problem: how to keep a digestible starch on hand in a house with no refrigeration. The oven drying dextrinizes the starch, which is why the resulting gruel was thought gentler on an unsettled stomach than plain flour stirred into milk. It was often recommended for summer diarrhoea in children, the complaint the period called cholera infantum. Its presence here is a reminder that a household cookbook was still expected to cover the invalid's tray alongside the supper party.