Home › Canning and Preserving › Indian Gruel
Indian Gruel
2 tablespoons corn meal 1 quart water Salt Sugar Mix the meal with a little cold water. Boil the quart of water; pour it on the corn meal; beat well; return it to the saucepan and boil fifteen or twenty minutes. Add a little salt and sweeten to taste.
A thin invalid's gruel, the sort of thing kept in the sickroom chapter of most turn-of-the-century books. It is very simple, and the only real work is keeping it smooth.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian" in American cookbooks means maize, not South Asian spice. Fine yellow or white cornmeal both work; coarse stone-ground meal will stay gritty at this ratio and cooking time.
- The stray line at the endThe closing "2 tablespoons sago" does not belong to this recipe; it is the opening ingredient line of the next one, carried over. What that recipe was cannot be recovered from this page alone.
- Slurry first, and pour hot onto coldThe hinge of the recipe. Mixing the meal to a loose paste with a few tablespoons of cold water, then pouring the boiling quart over it while beating, is what keeps it from seizing into lumps. Reversed, it clots immediately.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is not paddingCornmeal needs the full time for the starch to swell and lose its raw taste. Keep the heat low and stir often; at 2 tablespoons to a quart it will scorch on the bottom before it looks thick.
- ConsistencyThis is deliberately drinkable; at 2 tablespoons to the quart it stays very thin, nothing like porridge. Anything spoonable would need several times the meal.
- SeasoningSalt goes in near the end here, but adding a pinch at the start seasons the grain more evenly. Sweeten lightly; a teaspoon or two of sugar is in keeping with the intent.
- YieldAbout three cups after boiling. It serves two, or one person over a day, and will thicken somewhat on standing, so loosen it with hot water or milk when reheating.
Gruels like this were the backbone of nineteenth-century sick cookery, when invalid diet meant starch, liquid and as little work for the stomach as possible. American household manuals of the period often carry a run of them side by side, differentiated only by the thickener: cornmeal, oatmeal, arrowroot, sago, tapioca, rice flour. Cornmeal was among the cheapest and most widely stocked of those in the United States. Mrs. Fryer's book was built around a loose-leaf format, pages meant to be pulled, rearranged and added to by the owner, with the inevitable result that a leaf now and then ends up filed under an unexpected heading.