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Rice Gruel
2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt Mix rice and cold water; add scalded milk and cook in double boiler two hours, stirring occasionally. Strain, add salt, and serve.
A sickroom gruel rather than a pudding: rice cooked to collapse in milk, then strained so only the starchy liquid remains. It needs almost no attention, but it does need the full time in the double boiler.
- ProportionsThe ingredient list as printed gives only the milk and salt; the quantities of rice and cold water called for in the method are missing. Treat any figure you supply as a starting point and thin with more scalded milk if the strained gruel is too thick.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, around 180F. In 1907 this also served to check the milk's keeping quality; with pasteurised milk it now matters mainly for texture and for getting the rice started warm.
- Double boilerThe upper pan should not touch the water, and the water should barely tremble rather than boil hard. Milk cooked directly over heat for two hours will scorch and taste of it.
- Two hours is not paddingThe point is to break the rice grains down entirely so their starch passes into the milk. Stopping at thirty minutes leaves you with thin rice pudding, and the strainer will take out most of what you wanted.
- StrainingPress the rice against a fine sieve with the back of a spoon rather than simply letting it drain; the pulp forced through is what gives the gruel body. Discard the solids left behind.
- YieldRoughly two cups of finished gruel on the quantities implied, one or two invalid servings, though the exact yield depends on the missing rice and water amounts. It thickens as it cools and will want loosening with hot milk if it stands.
Gruels occupy a whole department of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery under headings like "Invalid Cookery" and "Food for the Sick," and rice gruel was among the standards, alongside barley water, arrowroot gruel and beef tea. The logic was that a patient with a disordered stomach should be given nourishment stripped of anything requiring work to digest: hence the long cooking, the straining out of every particle of solid, and the near-total absence of seasoning. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston and best known for its chocolate recipes, was a general household book and carried the expected invalid section. That mattered when a sick person needed something warm at an hour when the kitchen fire was out.