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Oatmeal Water
4 tablespoons fine oatmeal 4 cups boiling water salt Boil all ingredients twenty minutes, strain, cool, add water to make of pleasant consistency.
A thin oat drink from the invalid-cookery tradition, closer to barley water than to porridge. Two details decide whether it works: the grind of the oats and how much you thin it at the end.
- "Fine oatmeal"This means finely ground oats — oat flour or the finest milled grade, not rolled flakes and not coarse pinhead. Rolled oats will work but give a cloudier, slimier result; pulse them in a blender first if that is all you have.
- Proportions and yieldFour tablespoons to four cups is roughly 1 part oat flour to 16 parts water by volume. You will lose some to evaporation and to the strained solids, and the recipe then has you add water back, so the final yield depends entirely on how far you thin it.
- Boiling twenty minutesThe long boil is not overcooking here — it is what gelatinizes the starch so the liquid carries body and flavor. Stir occasionally and keep the heat low enough that it does not catch; oat starch scorches readily on a thin pan.
- StrainingA fine sieve is enough. Pressing the solids through gives a fuller drink; letting it drip gives a clearer one. A jelly bag or coffee filter yields the thinnest version.
- "Pleasant consistency"On cooling it will thicken and may set slightly. Thin with water until it pours like light cream — this is the whole judgment the recipe asks of you, and it is worth doing after chilling rather than while warm.
- Salt and seasoningNo quantity is given; a scant quarter teaspoon for the batch is enough to keep it from tasting flat. Lemon peel boiled with it, or a little sugar and lemon juice added after straining, follows period practice for the same class of drinks.
- KeepingA starchy, unacidified liquid with no preservative. Refrigerate and use within a day or two; it sours and separates quickly.
Grain waters — barley water, rice water, oatmeal water — were standing items in nineteenth and early twentieth century sickroom cookery, prescribed as something nourishing that a patient with no appetite could swallow. The drink is essentially a strained gruel. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it goes well beyond promoting its own product into a full domestic manual, invalid diets included.