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Infants' or Invalids' Food
Tie the flour in a cloth as a pudding, put it in boiling water and boil 3 hours. Scrape the inner part of the ball, and use a tablespoonful to a pint of milk to make gruel. To bake it, put it on a tin in the oven, and bake till it is a light brown colour. Flour treated in either of these ways is more digestible than used in its raw state.
Two methods for the same end: driving the raw starch out of wheat flour so it thickens smoothly and tastes cooked rather than pasty. The result is a keeping ingredient, not a finished dish — the gruel is made from it later.
- Not food for a babyWhatever the title says, a flour-and-milk gruel is not adequate nutrition for an infant and should not be used as one; the practice of feeding thin cereal gruels in place of milk was a major cause of infant malnutrition in this period. As a thin, bland cereal drink for an adult convalescent it is harmless enough.
- Quantity of flourThe original gives none. A pound of plain flour yields a great many servings of gruel, since a single tablespoon serves a pint of milk.
- Tying the clothUse a scalded, floured cotton or muslin cloth and tie it tightly with string, leaving no slack — loose flour turns to paste and the ball never sets. Keep the water at a steady boil and topped up for the full three hours; the ball must stay submerged.
- What you are left withAfter boiling, the outside is a wet paste and the inside a dry, chalky mass. Discard the paste, let the ball dry out thoroughly, then scrape or grate the hard core to a powder. The powder must be bone dry before it goes into a jar or it will spoil.
- Oven for the baked version"Bake till a light brown colour" implies a slow to moderate oven; the original gives no temperature, but somewhere around 300-325F answers. Spread the flour thinly on a tray and stir it from time to time so it colours evenly. Take it off the heat while it is pale biscuit-coloured, as it darkens quickly at the edges.
- Making the gruelOne tablespoon of the prepared flour to a pint of milk (an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a US pint 16; check which the book uses). Slake the flour with a little cold milk first, then stir into the rest and simmer three or four minutes until it thickens; it will be very thin, closer to a drink than a porridge. Salt or a little sugar improves it considerably.
- Why it worksDry heat breaks wheat starch down into dextrins, which is the point of the baked version — the same chemistry behind a browned roux. Dextrinized flour disperses in liquid without lumping and tastes toasted rather than raw. The boiled ball works differently, the wet heat swelling and gelatinizing the starch.
- YieldThe dry prepared flour keeps for months in a sealed jar in a dry cupboard.
Boiled and baked flour were standard sickroom stores in the nineteenth century, kept in the store cupboard alongside arrowroot, sago and isinglass. The reasoning behind them predates any understanding of starch chemistry: raw flour was held to be "indigestible" and irritating to a weak stomach, and long cooking was thought to render it fit for infants, the elderly and anyone recovering from fever. The observation was sound even if the explanation was not — dry heat does convert starch to more soluble dextrins, which is why baked flour also became a favourite thickener for delicate sauces. The three-hour boiled ball, wrapped in a pudding cloth, belonged to a kitchen where a pot sat over the fire all day anyway. Proprietary tinned products — malted and "predigested" farinaceous foods — came to compete with the home-prepared version.