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Oatmeal Gruel
Cook for three hours in a double boiler one half cup of oatmeal and three cups of boiling water. Season with one teaspoonful of salt. Or it may be cooked overnight in the fireless cooker. Strain and dilute with milk or cream.
A sickroom staple: oatmeal cooked far past porridge stage, then strained so only the starchy liquid remains. The long cook is the whole point, and the ratios are looser than they look.
- The hinge is the strainingThis is a drink, not a cereal. After cooking, press the oatmeal through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth and discard the solids; what you keep is a thin, slightly viscous liquid. Skipping the strain gives you thin porridge instead of gruel.
- Which oatmealIn a recipe of this period "oatmeal" is likely to mean steel-cut or coarsely ground oats rather than rolled flakes, though rolled oats were also in common use. Steel-cut holds up to three hours and yields a cleaner strained liquid. Rolled oats will collapse in well under an hour and instant oats in minutes, though the result is starchier and duller.
- Double boiler timingThree hours over simmering water is a gentle indirect heat that cannot scorch. Check the water level in the lower pan every 45 minutes or so and top it up with boiling water; a double boiler that runs dry will crack or burn.
- The fireless cookerA fireless cooker was an insulated box in which a preheated pot finished cooking on stored heat overnight. A slow cooker on low, or a heavy pot brought to a boil and left in a 200F oven, does the same job.
- The salt is highA full teaspoon in three cups of liquid is noticeably salty by current taste. A quarter teaspoon is a more usual starting point, adjusted after dilution.
- Dilution and yieldSome liquid is lost to evaporation and more is left behind in the discarded solids, so the strained gruel will be well short of the three cups you started with; the milk or cream then thins it further. Add the dairy off the heat and warm gently, as boiled milk in a starchy liquid tends to catch and skin over.
- Keeping itStrained gruel is a starch and dairy mixture with no acid and no sugar to protect it. Refrigerate promptly and use within a day or two; it thickens as it cools and can be loosened with more hot milk or water.
Gruel belongs to a long tradition of "invalid cookery," the branch of household manuals devoted to feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young at a time when hospitals were few and nursing happened at home. Its logic is pre-nutritional: solid food was thought to burden a weak digestion, so grain was cooked to collapse and then strained to remove anything the patient would have to work on, leaving starch, a little salt, and whatever the milk contributed. Oats were the usual base in British and American practice, with barley water and rice water filling much the same role.