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Arrowroot Gruel
Mix one tablespoonful of arrowroot with a little cold water to make a thin paste. Then add a cup of boiling water and a cup of milk, and boil ten minutes. Season with salt.
A two-ingredient thickened drink from the sickroom chapter, closer to a thin pudding than a beverage. The one thing worth changing is the cooking time.
- Do not boil it ten minutesArrowroot thickens at a lower temperature than cornstarch (somewhere in the region of 150-180F, depending on the source) and tends to thin again if held at a hard boil, which is why long-cooked arrowroot gruel can turn watery. Bring the mixture just to a simmer, stir until it coats the spoon, and take it off the heat -- one to two minutes is enough.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe cold-water paste is not optional. Arrowroot dropped dry into hot liquid seizes into lumps that will not disperse. Mix it smooth with about two tablespoons of cold water before anything hot goes in.
- QuantitiesOne tablespoon of arrowroot to two cups of liquid gives a pourable gruel you can drink from a cup. For something spoonable, use two tablespoons.
- Milk and scorchingAdd the milk after the arrowroot has thickened in the boiling water, or use a heavy pan and stir constantly. Milk plus starch on direct heat scorches on the bottom quickly and the burnt taste carries through the whole cup.
- Arrowroot todaySold as arrowroot powder or arrowroot flour in the baking aisle, from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea. It is not interchangeable with cornstarch here: cornstarch tolerates longer cooking but gives a cloudy, faintly cereal-tasting result rather than the clear, neutral gel that made arrowroot the invalid's starch.
- SeasoningSalt alone is bleak by current tastes. A teaspoon of sugar, a scrape of nutmeg or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the hot milk are all flavourings that turn up in period arrowroot preparations, and in these small amounts none of them will noticeably change the texture.
- YieldOne serving, about two cups. It thickens further as it cools; drink it warm.
Arrowroot was the standard invalid starch of the nineteenth century, valued precisely because it tasted of almost nothing and produced a clear, bland, easily swallowed gel. Most of the supply reaching American and British kitchens came from St. Vincent in the Caribbean, where the rhizomes were washed, pulped and settled out as a fine white powder; the name is often traced to an Arawak word rendered in English as "aru-aru", though the folk explanation that the root drew poison from arrow wounds is repeated at least as often. Much of what the period offered the sick came fortified with brandy or port, and a gruel of arrowroot, water and milk answered the same need without it.