Home › Chafing Dish Delicacies › Oatmeal Caudle
Oatmeal Caudle
Add one egg yolk and one tablespoon brandy or sherry to Oatmeal Gruel. 2 tablespoons ground rice 1 cup cold water
A two-line invalid's drink that assumes you already have the book's Oatmeal Gruel in the blazer pan. The trailing "2 tablespoons ground rice / 1 cup cold water" is a stray ingredient line from the neighbouring rice gruel and has nothing to do with the caudle.
- The hinge: temper the yolkBeat the yolk with a spoonful of the hot gruel first, then stir that back into the pan off the direct flame. Dropped straight into hot gruel it scrambles into threads and the drink is spoiled.
- What the base isOatmeal gruel of this period is typically something on the order of 1 to 2 tablespoons of fine oatmeal to a cup of water, simmered long and slow and strained, so it pours like thin cream. Rolled oats work but give a cloudier, more porridge-like result than the fine ground meal intended.
- Cook the egg throughAfter the yolk goes in, keep the pan over hot water and stir until the mixture reaches 160F and just coats the spoon. Do not let it boil. If it will not be brought to that temperature, use a pasteurised yolk.
- Chafing dish translationGentle heat -- Keep the mixture off direct flame once the yolk is in. If you are working over a spirit lamp, use the hot-water pan rather than the blazer; otherwise a small saucepan set inside a wider pan of simmering water does the same job.
- The spiritsA tablespoon of brandy or sherry per cup is by modern taste a lot in a single serving. It goes in last, after the pan is off the heat, so the aroma is not driven off.
- Seasoning the book leaves outCaudle is bland without help. A pinch of salt, a spoonful of sugar and a grating of nutmeg or a strip of lemon peel simmered in the gruel are all period-appropriate and all improve it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity for the gruel; as written it is a single serving, meant to be drunk warm from a cup rather than eaten with a spoon.
Caudle is one of the oldest surviving names in English cookery — a warm, thickened, lightly alcoholic drink, coming through Anglo-Norman caudel from Latin calidus, "warm," a root it shares with the French chaudeau. For centuries it was the standard restorative for invalids and for women lying in after childbirth, thickened with oatmeal, breadcrumbs or ground rice, enriched with egg, and sharpened with wine or ale. By the time Lowney's book appeared in the early twentieth century the sickroom tradition had merged with the chafing-dish craze, when a spirit-lamp burner on the sideboard was fashionable equipment for late suppers and for warming light nourishment without waking the kitchen. Thin cereal drinks thickened with yolk were exactly what such a burner was expected to produce.