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Cornmeal Gruel
Take two tablespoonfuls of cornmeal, mix with one tablespoonful of flour and a little salt. Dilute with water to make a thin paste. Stir into one and a half pints of boiling water, and cook in the fireless cooker overnight, or cook slowly for one hour on the stove. Serve with milk or cream.
A thin invalid's gruel, the sickroom staple of the era, and one of the few cereal preparations in a book otherwise devoted to drinks. It works exactly as written, though a few of its assumptions need translating.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe is mixing the meal and flour with cold water into a smooth thin paste before it meets the boiling water. Cornmeal dropped dry into hot liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will undo.
- QuantitiesOne and a half US pints is 3 cups, or about 700 ml. With only two tablespoons of meal to three cups of water this is deliberately thin — a drink taken from a cup, not a porridge eaten with a spoon.
- The fireless cookerAn insulated box that held preheated food at temperature without further fuel — the ancestor of the slow cooker and the modern thermal pot. A low slow cooker overnight, or a covered pot in a 200F oven, gives the same long gentle hold. The stovetop hour is the alternative the original already offers.
- Cornmeal choicePeriod cornmeal was usually stone-ground and coarser than today's degerminated supermarket meal. Fine or medium yellow cornmeal hydrates fastest here; coarse grits or polenta will need the full hour and will still be gritty at this ratio.
- Stir and watch the bottomEven at this dilution, starch settles and scorches on a direct flame. Stir every ten minutes or so on the stove, or use a double boiler.
- Consistency after standingGruel thickens noticeably as it cools and again overnight. Thin it back with boiling water or hot milk before serving rather than starting thicker.
- Seasoning and yieldMakes roughly two to three cups, or two invalid servings. The salt is the only seasoning given; a little sugar, or a strip of lemon peel cooked in and removed, is worth having.
Gruel was the default food of the nineteenth-century sickroom on both sides of the Atlantic — thin, warm, starchy, and asking nothing of a patient who could not chew. Cornmeal, called Indian meal in older American books, made the cheapest version; oatmeal and barley gruels filled the same role in British nursing manuals. Its appearance in a book of drinks is not an accident of filing: gruel was understood as something sipped, and "invalid drinks" was a standing chapter in domestic cookery, alongside beef tea, barley water and toast water. Wine, brandy and whisky had long been standard in sickroom cookery, so a chapter of invalid preparations that used none of them would have suited a temperance collection.