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Arrowroot Water
2 pippin apples 1 quart water 1 teaspoon arrowroot Sugar Pinch of grated nutmeg Wash the apples and cut them into small pieces, removing the Put them in the cold water over the fire and boil until the apples are soft, which will take an hour or more. Mix the arrowroot in a little cold water until perfectly smooth; stir into the apple water; let all boil together for ten minutes; strain through a sieve; sweeten to taste and set aside to cool. Serve as a drink with a little grated nutmeg over the top.
The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list — apples and water are used in the method but never quantified, and the instruction to remove the cores breaks off mid-sentence. Treat the following as the working proportions for a sickroom drink of this type.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the arrowroot, sugar and nutmeg survive in the ingredient list. As a working reconstruction, try 2 or 3 tart apples to 1 quart of cold water; 1 teaspoon of arrowroot suits roughly that volume. These figures are ours, not the book's.
- ArrowrootStill sold as arrowroot starch or arrowroot powder. It must be slaked in cold water to a smooth slurry before it meets anything hot, or it will seize into lumps that no sieve will save.
- Do not overboil the thickened liquidArrowroot thickens at a fairly low temperature, well below boiling, and then thins again with prolonged heat and stirring. Ten minutes as the recipe directs is about the outer limit; the drink should be just barely bodied, not gelled, and it will thin further as it cools.
- The hour of boilingAn hour of simmering does more than cook the apples through; it draws pectin, acid and flavour out of the fruit and skins. Keep it at a bare simmer with the pan partly covered and top up with water if it drops much below the starting level.
- ApplesUse a sharp cooking apple with plenty of acid — Bramley, Granny Smith, or windfalls. Skins go in; they carry much of the pectin. The recipe's sentence breaks off at "removing the", most likely the cores.
- StrainingA sieve alone leaves it cloudy. For a clearer drink, line the sieve with damp muslin and let it drip rather than pressing the pulp through.
- Yield and servingDepends on the reconstructed quantities above; roughly three or four glasses. Serve cold with nutmeg grated over the surface at the moment of serving; keep it covered in the refrigerator and stir before pouring, as the starch settles.
Arrowroot water belongs to the large class of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "invalid cookery" — thin, bland, lightly thickened drinks and gruels served to the sick, the convalescent and the very young at a time when a fever meant weeks in bed and little else was thought digestible. Arrowroot, the starch of the West Indian Maranta arundinacea, was prized for exactly that reputation: it was held to be gentler on the stomach than wheat flour or cornstarch, and tins of it sat in household medicine cupboards as much as in pantries. Apple water, sweetened and spiced, was the standard base for a cooling drink for someone with a temperature. The text as it survives is garbled, though whether through a misfiled page, a printing fault or a loss in reproduction cannot be established.