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Cornstarch Gruel
Mix a teaspoonful of cornstarch with a little cold water to a smooth paste. Scald a cup of milk and add the cornstarch. Stir until smooth and of the consistency of cream. Season with salt, or it may be sweetened and flavored with vanilla or nutmeg.
A one-cup sickroom drink that hinges entirely on the cold-water slurry and a minute or two of real cooking after the starch goes in.
- Slurry first, alwaysCornstarch dumped into hot milk seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will smooth. Work the teaspoon of starch with about a tablespoon of cold water until it is loose and free of grit before it touches the milk.
- What "scald" meansBring the milk to roughly 180F, the point where it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, not a rolling boil. Boiled milk throws a skin and tastes cooked.
- Cook the starch outThe recipe stops at "stir until smooth," but cornstarch needs a further minute or two at a bare simmer or the gruel keeps a raw, chalky edge. It will thicken visibly and then stop thickening; that is the signal.
- Consistency of creamThis means pourable single cream or half-and-half, thin enough to drink from a cup. One teaspoon to a cup of milk is deliberately slack; if it sets up too far, thin it with a little more hot milk rather than water.
- Salt or sugar, not bothSalt or sugar -- The recipe offers a choice: seasoned with salt, or sweetened and flavoured with vanilla or nutmeg. A pinch of salt improves either version.
- Skin and servingA film forms as it cools. Cover the cup, or stir it back in and serve warm within a few minutes. Yield is a single cup, one serving.
- Milk choiceWhole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim milk produces something noticeably thin and watery. Cornstarch will thicken plant milks, though the flavour is quite different from what was intended.
Cornstarch gruel belongs to the once-large literature of invalid cookery, the chapter many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manuals devoted to feeding the sick: beef tea, barley water, arrowroot, gruels of oatmeal or cornstarch. The logic was that an unwell stomach wanted something bland, warm, liquid and lightly thickened, and that starch and milk together were nourishing without being taxing. Cornstarch was an industrial product of the mid-1800s, and was widely promoted in the United States as a cheaper domestic alternative to imported arrowroot; it moved from puddings into the sickroom for much the same reason.