Gruel, to Make
INGREDIENTS for 1 pint of gruel.-1 tablespoonful of Robinson's patent groats, 2 tablespoonfuls of cold water, 1 pint of boiling water.
A GROUSE.
B Mix the prepared groats smoothly with the cold water in a basin; pour over them the boiling water, stirring it all the time.
Put it into a very clean saucepan; boil the gruel for 10 minutes, keeping it well stirred; sweeten to taste and serve. It may be flavoured with a small piece of lemon-peel, by boiling it in the gruel, or a little grated nutmeg may be put in; but in these matters the taste of the patient should be consulted.
Pour the gruel in a tumbler, and serve.
When wine is allowed to the invalid, 2 tablespoonfuls of sherry or port make this preparation very nice. In cases of colds, the same quantity of spirits is sometimes grouse is highly esteemed by many, and this part of many game birds is considered the finestflavoured.
Grouse, Trussing of. In plucking these birds, leave the breast-feathers till after trussing, the skin being delicate and added instead of wine.
TIME.-10 minutes.
Gudgeons. INGREDIENTS.-Egg and bread-crumbs sufficient for the quantity of fish; hot lard.
Do not scrape off the scales, but take out the gills and inside, and cleanse thoroughly; GROUSE READY FOR TRUSSING. easily broken. Cut off the head, leaving enough skin to skewer back, then loosen the inside at neck and squeeze out the inside. After wiping the inside, bring the legs close to the breast, between it and the side-bones, and put a skewer through the pinions and the thick part of the thighs, Then remove the feathers from the breast with a knife so as to avoid breaking the skin. Partridges and pheasants are trussed THE GUDGEON. wipe them dry, flour and dip them into egg, and sprinkle over with bread-crumbs.
Fry of a nice brown.
TIME.-3 or 4 minutes.
SEASONABLE from March to July.
GUINEA-FOWL, THE. 177 GURNET, OR GURNARD.
A thin invalid gruel, closer to a drink than a porridge, built on a proprietary pre-cooked oat product that no longer exists in that form. The whole point is smoothness, and that comes from slaking the meal in cold water before the boiling water goes in.
- Robinson's patent groatsA branded preparation of hulled oats ground fine and sold on its ability to cook quickly to a smooth gruel. The nearest modern stand-in is fine or superfine oatmeal, sometimes sold as oat flour; instant oat cereal also works. Rolled oats will not dissolve into a drinkable gruel at this ratio.
- Cold water firstMixing the meal to a slurry with the two tablespoons of cold water is the hinge of the recipe. Tipping meal straight into boiling water gives lumps that no amount of stirring will break down.
- The 10 minutesThat timing suits a fine, quick-cooking prepared meal of the kind named. Plain fine oatmeal needs 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering and steady stirring to lose its raw, chalky edge, and will want extra water as it thickens.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of meal to a pint of water is deliberately thin, meant to be swallowed from a tumbler by someone with no appetite. For a gruel you would eat with a spoon, treble the meal.
- TumblerA straight-sided drinking glass. Warm it first, since hot liquid poured into cold glass risks cracking it, and the gruel loses heat fast in any case.
- FlavouringLemon peel should go in at the start so it has the full boil to give up its oil; nutmeg is better grated over at the end, as prolonged heat flattens it. Salt, which the recipe omits, does more for the flavour than sugar.
- YieldOne pint, or two tumblers. It thickens as it cools and separates on standing, so make it to order rather than in advance.
Gruel belongs to the sickroom rather than the dining room, and Mrs Beeton's book gives it among a run of invalid preparations: beef tea, barley water, arrowroot, whey. Oats boiled thin in water were the standard first food for a convalescent through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cheap, bland and easy to keep down, which is why gruel became shorthand in Victorian writing for institutional poverty as well as for nursing. Robinson's Patent Groats, named in the ingredients, was a proprietary prepared-oat product widely advertised in Britain in this period and is generally traced to the firm of Keen, Robinson and Company; its selling point was that it cooked to smoothness in minutes, which is why so short a boiling time is specified here. The wine and spirits are period medicine rather than indulgence: sherry, port and a spoonful of brandy for a cold were all routine additions to invalid food, and the closing instruction that "the taste of the patient should be consulted" is a fair summary of how such cookery was understood.