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Oatmeal Gruel
Mix oatmeal with cold water; add salt and boiling 1 cup cold water + teaspoon salt water, and cook two hours, or better still over night, in double boiler. Strain and serve; thin with hot water or milk if not of the desired consistency.
A sickroom gruel rather than a breakfast porridge — thin, strained, and meant to be sipped. The transcription has the ingredient column collapsed into the middle of the sentence, so read the quantities with care.
- The garbled measurementsThe phrase "boiling 1 cup cold water + teaspoon salt water" looks like an ingredient column collapsed into the sentence. What survives is 1 cup cold water and a teaspoon of salt; the amount of oatmeal is missing entirely. Comparable period gruel recipes often call for a tablespoon or two of oatmeal per cup of liquid, but the figure this book intended cannot be recovered from the page.
- A teaspoon of salt is a lotFor a single cup of thin gruel that is far more salt than modern palates accept. It suggests the original quantities were larger, or that the salt was measured against several cups of water. Salt to taste instead.
- Oatmeal means steel-cutOatmeal may mean cut oats -- In 1907 "oatmeal" could still mean cut or coarse-ground oats, though rolled oats were already widely sold by then and the quick-cooking flakes now standard came later. If cut oats are meant, rolled oats will break down in a fraction of the time and give a gluier, less clean-tasting gruel.
- Why two hoursThe long double-boiler cook is not for softening alone but for extracting starch into the water, which is what gives strained gruel its body. Steel-cut oats will do this in 45 to 60 minutes over direct low heat with stirring; the double boiler simply made unattended overnight cooking safe.
- Overnight cooking, reconsideredLeaving a starchy cereal at low warmth all night sits in the temperature range where Bacillus cereus spores can germinate. Cook it through and refrigerate, or make it in the morning.
- Straining is the pointDo not skip it. Press the cooked oats through a fine sieve and discard the coarse bran and residue; the smooth liquid is the dish. Unstrained, it is simply thin porridge.
- YieldAs written, roughly one cup — a single invalid's serving. Thin with hot milk rather than water if the person eating it needs the calories.
Gruel belongs to the once-large genre of invalid cookery, the chapter that many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manuals carried for feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young. Before intravenous fluids and commercial formulas, a strained cereal water was one of the few things a fevered patient could be persuaded to take, and cookbooks graded such dishes by thinness: barley water, rice water, oatmeal gruel, then gradually thicker porridges as strength returned. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it padded its confectionery specialities out into a full general household volume, invalid gruel included.