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Flour Gruel
2 tablespoons flour 2 cups scalded milk + cup cold water 1 teaspoon salt Mix flour with cold water, add scalded milk and salt. Cook in double boiler thirty minutes, stirring often.
A plain invalid's gruel — flour cooked slowly in milk until the starch loses its raw taste. It is a two-ingredient dish, so the only things that matter are the ratio and the patience.
- The water quantityThe recipe calls for a fraction of a cup of cold water to slake the flour, but the fraction is not legible in this printing. A quarter cup is enough to make two tablespoons of flour into a lump-free slurry; use only as much as you need to get a smooth cream.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, until a rim of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, around 180F. With raw milk it also served to check the milk; with pasteurised milk it now simply speeds the cooking and helps the starch swell evenly.
- Slake before you pourThe hinge of the dish. Flour stirred straight into hot milk seizes into lumps that thirty minutes of cooking will not undo. Mix it to a smooth paste with the cold water first, then add the hot milk in a thin stream while whisking.
- The double boilerNot optional. Flour and milk over direct heat scorch on the bottom and the burnt taste carries through the whole pan. If you have no double boiler, set a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, with the water not touching the bowl.
- Thirty minutes is rightUnlike many old timings, this one should not be cut. Two tablespoons of flour thicken within a few minutes, but the pasty, raw-flour flavour takes the full half hour of gentle cooking to disappear. Stir every few minutes to keep a skin from forming.
- SaltA full teaspoon in two cups reads as high by current palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- YieldAbout two cups, one or two servings. It thickens further as it cools; thin with a little hot milk if you are holding it.
Gruel — thin cereal cooked in milk or water — was standard invalid cookery well into the twentieth century, and nearly every general cookbook of the period carried a short cluster of these recipes alongside beef tea, barley water and milk toast. Flour gruel was the plainest of them, made from what any kitchen already had, and was given to convalescents, to the very young and to the elderly on the reasoning, then widely held, that long-cooked starch was easy to digest. Its appearance under chafing dish cookery may reflect the appliance's practical role: a chafing dish with a spirit lamp could be worked at a bedside or in a room without a stove, which mattered when someone had to be fed at intervals through the night.