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Creamed Gluten Mush
1 1/2 pints milk 1/2 pint cream 1 cup gluten meal 1 teaspoon salt Cook the same as for gluten mush.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have already read the plain gluten mush a few lines above, where the meal is stirred into hot liquid and cooked slowly. The whole difficulty is lump control.
- The measures in cups1 1/2 pints of milk is 3 cups; 1/2 pint of cream is 1 cup. Total liquid is 4 cups to 1 cup of gluten meal, a fairly loose porridge that thickens considerably as it stands.
- Gluten meal is not vital wheat glutenPeriod gluten meal was a high-protein wheat flour made by washing out part of the starch; the protein content of commercial brands varied a good deal, but it was far below that of modern vital wheat gluten, which runs 75-80 percent protein and will seize into rubbery strings in hot milk. A workable substitute is bread flour with a spoonful or two of vital wheat gluten worked in.
- The hinge: mix it coldGluten flour hydrates fast and clumps in hot liquid. Whisk the meal into a cup of the cold milk to a smooth slurry, then stir that into the rest of the milk and cream as it heats. Lumps, once formed, are very hard to whisk out.
- Double boiler, not direct heatMilk and cream at this ratio scorch on a bare pan bottom, and the protein in the meal sticks. A double boiler is the safer reading of the cross-referenced method: cook over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until it is thick and no longer tastes of raw flour.
- CreamA full cup of cream in 4 cups of liquid makes this a notably rich version of the plain mush. Half-and-half in place of the cream gives a lighter mush without changing the method.
- Yield and servingAbout four generous breakfast servings. Serve hot with more cream, or pour into a loaf pan, chill until firm, slice and fry in butter the next morning, as was often done with mushes of this kind.
- Not gluten-free, emphaticallyThe name misleads a modern eye. This is concentrated wheat gluten and is exactly what anyone with coeliac disease must avoid.
Gluten flour belongs to the health-food cookery that grew up around the American sanitarium movement in the late nineteenth century, when milled-out gluten preparations were sold both as a high-protein food for vegetarians and, before insulin, as a low-starch bread and porridge flour for diabetics. Meatless cookbooks of this period lean heavily on it: with meat off the table, gluten supplied the protein, and it appears in these books as mush, as steaks, as roasts and as a binder. A cereal section that offers gluten mush plain and then again creamed appears to follow what was arguably a common pattern in the genre, in which one base preparation is repeated with richer liquid for those who needed feeding up. The instruction to "cook the same as" an earlier recipe is often said to be characteristic of the era's cookbooks, which may have assumed the reader worked straight through a chapter rather than dipping in at a single page.