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Farina Gruel
To one cup of boiling water pour in slowly three tablespoonfuls of farina. Bring to a boil and put over boiling water and cook fifteen or twenty minutes. Then pour in one cup of milk and cook fifteen minutes more. Season with one teaspoonful of salt, or sugar may be added if desired.
A plain invalid's gruel, thinner than porridge and meant to be drunk from a cup. Two things need translating: what farina is, and the fact that the cooking method assumes an old-style granular cereal.
- FarinaFarina is finely milled wheat endosperm — the cereal sold today as Cream of Wheat, and close to, though not identical with, fine semolina, which is milled from durum wheat. It is not flour and not cornmeal.
- Cooking timeThe thirty to thirty-five minutes here assumes uncoated, non-instant granules. Modern farina is cut finer and often enriched; quick-cooking grades thicken in a few minutes and can turn gluey if held for half an hour. Cook it until it is smooth and just thickened, then add the milk.
- "Put over boiling water"That means a double boiler — a bowl or upper pan set over simmering water, so the starch cannot scorch. Sensible for a long cook; unnecessary for a short one if you stir.
- The saltA full teaspoon in two cups of liquid is aggressively salty by current taste and out of step with modern sodium advice. A quarter teaspoon is closer to what most people want, and the recipe already offers sugar as the alternative.
- Adding the farinaRain it into the boiling water in a thin stream while stirring. Dumped in at once it seizes into lumps that no amount of later cooking will disperse.
- ConsistencyGruel is meant to pour. If it sets up too stiff after the milk goes in, thin it with more hot milk rather than water, which flattens the flavour.
- YieldAbout two cups — one generous invalid's serving, or two small cups. Best strained through a sieve and served warm; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
Gruel occupies a whole small genre of nineteenth-century cookery: thin cereal drinks for the sick, the very young and the very old, when a fever diet meant liquids and little else. Farina, oatmeal, barley and arrowroot each had their partisans, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried an "invalid cookery" or "sick-room" chapter alongside the roasts and cakes. The distinguishing feature of these recipes is blandness on purpose — salt or sugar, and nothing more — on the reasoning that a weakened stomach should be asked to do as little work as possible.