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Arrowroot
2 teaspoons arrowroot 1 pint milk or water Sugar Mix the arrowroot in a little cold water. Boil the water or milk; stir in the arrowroot and boil until thickened and clear, stirring constantly. Sweeten to taste. core. 2 pippin apples 1 quart water
This is invalid cookery — a thin arrowroot gruel of the sort fed to convalescents and infants — and it is very quick, provided the starch is slaked in cold liquid first. Note that the page has picked up stray lines from a neighbouring recipe: the trailing "core. 2 pippin apples 1 quart water" belongs to an apple preparation, not to this one.
- The hinge: slake the starch coldArrowroot dumped into hot liquid seizes into lumps that will not disperse. Stir the 2 teaspoons into about 2 tablespoons of cold water to a smooth cream, then pour that into the boiling liquid in a thin stream while stirring.
- "Boil until thickened and clear"Arrowroot thickens almost instantly and turns from milky to translucent — that change is the doneness cue. It needs well under a minute at a bare boil; prolonged boiling or vigorous stirring after it sets breaks the gel down and the mixture thins again.
- Quantities and proportion1 pint is 2 cups. Two teaspoons to 2 cups gives a drinking consistency, barely thicker than cream; for a spoonable pudding you would want three to four times that much starch.
- Milk versus waterWith milk, use a heavy pan and moderate heat, and stir the bottom constantly — milk scorches where water will not. With milk the set is softer.
- SweeteningAdd sugar after thickening, off the heat; a tablespoon or two is typical, with a grating of nutmeg, a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk, or a spoonful of sherry or brandy in the adult version.
- Yield and servingTwo servings as a hot drink or one bowl. It is best made fresh and drunk warm — chilled arrowroot weeps and turns slippery on standing, and it will not reheat well.
- Buying arrowrootGenuine arrowroot is the powdered rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, sold in small jars in the baking aisle. Some older "arrowroot" powders were adulterated with potato or wheat starch; modern cornstarch behaves similarly but tastes chalkier and sets more opaque.
Arrowroot gruel earned its place in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks not as a dessert but as sickroom food: bland, easily digested, and thought suitable for infants, invalids and anyone recovering from a stomach complaint. Household manuals of the period often carried a page or two of such preparations — beef tea, barley water, gruel, wine whey — because home nursing was a domestic duty and the cook was expected to supply the diet. The starch itself came from the West Indies and Central America, where the Maranta rhizome was grown and washed into a fine white flour; St. Vincent supplied much of the world's crop into the twentieth century. The name is traditionally traced to indigenous use of the plant as a poultice for arrow wounds, though the derivation is disputed and may simply be a corruption of an Arawak word.