Home › Canning and Preserving › Arrowroot Gruel
Arrowroot Gruel
2 tablespoons arrowroot 1 quart boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar Few drops vanilla Mix the arrowroot with just enough cold water to form a thin paste; add part of boiling water; mix well and add remaining hot water. Boil for five minutes and place in cooker for one hour. Cool; add a few drops of vanilla and a little cream if desired.
A thin sickroom gruel of the kind every early twentieth-century cookbook carried. It comes together in minutes on a modern stove; the long finish in the "cooker" is the part that needs translating.
- The "cooker"This means a fireless or insulated cooker — a lidded box or thermos-style vessel that held a hot pot at temperature without further fuel. A vacuum flask, or a covered pan set in a low 200F oven, does the same job, and the hour is optional rather than structural.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the dish. Arrowroot must be smoothed with cold water before any hot liquid touches it, or it seizes into lumps that will not break up afterward.
- Don't overboil the starchArrowroot thickens at a fairly low temperature, below a boil, and thins again with prolonged heat and stirring. Five minutes at a boil, then an hour hot, will leave you with a very loose gruel — which is what an invalid drink was meant to be. If you want body, take it off the heat as soon as it turns clear and glossy.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons to a quart is about 1 part starch to 32 parts water — deliberately drinkable rather than spoonable. For a porridge-like consistency, four to five times that starch would be needed.
- SaltA full teaspoon in a quart of a barely sweetened drink reads as savory to modern palates. Half that, or less, suits most people now.
- Vanilla and cream at the endBoth are added off the heat for good reason: vanilla's aromatics flash off in a boiling pot, and cream stirred into simmering starch can curdle or thin the gel.
- YieldRoughly one quart, or four cups, allowing for a little loss in boiling. It thickens somewhat as it cools; a whisk and a little hot water loosen it again.
Arrowroot is the starch washed from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, a tropical American plant grown commercially in the West Indies; Bermuda and St. Vincent arrowroot were the grades named in nineteenth-century advertising, and St. Vincent remained the best-known source into the twentieth century. Its reputation rested less on flavor — it has almost none — than on digestibility: through the 1800s and well into the 1900s, arrowroot gruel, barley water and beef tea formed the standard repertoire of sickroom or "invalid" cookery, foods intended for people who could keep little else down, including infants weaned early. General cookbooks of the period commonly carried a handful of them, usually salted and only faintly sweetened, on the theory that a convalescent wanted nourishment rather than pleasure. The vanilla and the optional spoonful of cream here are small concessions to the patient.