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Cracker Gruel
Pour a cup of boiling water over four tablespoonfuls of cracker crumbs and bring to a boil. Add a cup of milk and season with salt. Serve hot.
A sickroom drink from the era when invalids lived on thin, bland, warm things. It comes together in about five minutes, and the only real decisions are which cracker to use and how thick you want it.
- The cracker matters mostThe original says only "cracker crumbs," which in this period most likely meant a plain water cracker or soda cracker, dry and hard. Modern saltines are salted on top, so if you use them, go easy on the added salt and taste before seasoning.
- Crumb textureCrush the crackers fine, to something between coarse sand and breadcrumbs. Larger shards will not soften in the short boil and give a lumpy, pasty result rather than a gruel.
- Don't boil the milk hardBring the cracker and water mixture to a boil, then add the milk and heat only to steaming. A rolling boil after the milk goes in scorches the bottom of the pan and gives the drink a cooked, sulfurous taste.
- Strain if it is meant to be drunkAt these proportions it stays fairly thin, but the crumbs leave it grainy. For something sippable from a cup, press it through a sieve and thin with a little more hot milk.
- QuantityOne cup of water plus one cup of milk makes about two cups, allowing for a little loss in boiling -- one large serving or two small ones. It does not hold well and separates on standing, so make it as needed.
- SeasoningSalt is all the original asks for, and for an invalid that was the point. Nutmeg or a little sugar turns up in other period gruel recipes if the patient could take it.
Gruels of this kind fill the "invalid cookery" chapters of American household books from the 1870s through the 1920s: thin, warm, low in fibre, and made from whatever dry starch the pantry held cracker, arrowroot, barley, oatmeal or Indian meal. They were prescribed less for nourishment than for the belief that a weak stomach could manage nothing else, and that a hot bland drink at intervals kept a fever patient going. The traditional sickroom standbys were wine whey, milk punch, and beef tea laced with brandy, and books written on the dry side of the argument had to supply substitutes for all of them. Cracker gruel, needing only boiling water, milk, salt, and the broken remains of a cracker barrel, was the plainest possible answer.