Home › Canning and Preserving › Cracker Gruel
Cracker Gruel
at once. 2 tablespoons powdered cracker 1/2 cup boiling water 1/2 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt Pour the water over the cracker; add the milk and salt; bring to a boil and serve.
An invalid's gruel, and about as plain as cooking gets. The only real decisions are what cracker you use and how fine you grind it.
- "Powdered cracker"Plain soda or water crackers crushed to a flour-fine powder, not crumbs — a few seconds in a spice grinder or a rolling pin and a sieve. Two tablespoons of powder is a small handful of saltines. Coarse crumbs will stay gritty and settle to the bottom.
- Order of operationsThe boiling water goes onto the cracker first for a reason: it swells the starch and prevents lumps. Adding the milk before the cracker has softened gives you a thin liquid with grains suspended in it.
- Bring to a boil, brieflyOnce the milk is in, take it just to the boil over low heat, stirring, then serve. Milk on direct heat scorches quickly at this volume; a small heavy pan and constant stirring, or a double boiler, both work.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon in one cup of liquid is noticeable seasoning, and modern crackers are already salted. Start with a pinch and taste.
- YieldOne cup, which is a single serving of the sort meant to be drunk from a cup or eaten with a spoon while sitting up in bed.
- "At once"The fragment at the top of the page appears to be the tail of the preceding recipe, but the instruction applies here too. Gruel thickens and skins over as it stands, and reheating makes it pasty.
Gruel of this kind belongs to the tradition of "invalid cookery," a standard department in American and British household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, when convalescence happened at home and the cook was expected to feed a patient who could manage nothing solid. Before crackers, gruel meant oatmeal or barley boiled long and strained; the cracker version is a shortcut made possible by commercially baked soda and water crackers. Because the cracker is already baked, its starch cooks in moments rather than the half hour or more a grain gruel demanded — a genuine convenience in a sickroom.