Gluten Mush
1 1/2 cups gluten meal 1 quart water 1 teaspoon salt When the water is boiling, add the salt, and stir in quickly and lightly the gluten meal. Cook a few minutes over the fire, and serve.
A three-ingredient boiled cereal that depends entirely on how you add the meal and how long you cook it. The original assumes a familiarity with gluten flour that most kitchens no longer have.
- What gluten meal isA high-protein wheat product made by washing much of the starch out of flour, sold in the early 1900s for diabetic and invalid diets. The nearest current equivalent is vital wheat gluten, sold for bread baking, though it is far more concentrated than the period product; a blend of vital wheat gluten with a high-protein bread flour comes closer to what the author had.
- The hinge: how the meal goes in"Quickly and lightly" is the whole recipe. Gluten meal tends to hydrate and grab faster than cornmeal or oats, and dumped in at once it is likely to seize into rubbery lumps that are hard to beat out. Rain it in through your fingers in a thin stream while whisking hard, or slake it first in a cup of cold water and pour that into the boiling pot.
- Do not overcook"A few minutes" is best read as only a few: check it early. Because much of the starch has been washed out, it behaves less like an ordinary starch mush and can go tough and stringy rather than creamy with long simmering. Stop as soon as it holds a soft ribbon on the spoon.
- Proportions and consistency1 1/2 cups meal to 1 quart water gives a loose porridge. Gluten meals vary widely in absorption, so hold back a quarter of the meal and judge by eye; expect to adjust rather than trust the ratio.
- YieldAbout four breakfast servings. If it sets firm enough when cold, it can be turned out of a loaf pan, sliced and fried the next morning, as was commonly done with other mushes.
- ServingThe recipe gives no accompaniment. Milk or cream and a little salt suit it better than sugar, since the flavour is savoury and faintly bready rather than sweet.
- Not gluten-freeThe name misleads modern readers badly. This is essentially pure wheat gluten and is the single worst thing on the table for anyone with coeliac disease or a wheat allergy.
Gluten flour and gluten meal belong to a specific moment in American food: the decades before insulin, when a low-starch, high-protein diet was among the few management options available for diabetes, and when health reformers and sanitarium kitchens were promoting wheat protein as a meat substitute. Battle Creek and its imitators sold gluten flour and other gluten preparations by mail, and the products turn up throughout invalid-cookery and vegetarian books of the period. The same substance, handled differently, is the basis of seitan; wheat gluten has long been used in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist cooking, though the connection was not generally drawn in English-language cookbooks of this era.