Home › Invalid Drinks › Oatmeal Water
Oatmeal Water
Mix two tablespoonfuls of oatmeal in a cupful of cold water until smooth. Add this to a quart of boiling water and boil for half an hour. Season with salt. Strain and serve either hot or cold.
A thin oat gruel strained to a drinkable consistency — closer to a savoury barley water than to porridge. It is simple, but a few details decide whether you get a smooth drink or a pan of scorched paste.
- Slake the oatmeal firstThe cold-water slurry is the hinge of the recipe. Oatmeal tipped dry into boiling water clumps, and the lumps are slow to break down; mixed smooth in cold water first, the starch disperses evenly. "Oatmeal" in books of this kind usually means ground or cut oats, sold in coarse to fine grades; steel-cut or pinhead oatmeal is the nearest thing on sale today. Rolled oats will work but give a cloudier, blander liquid and need less time.
- Half an hour is not too longUnusually for old recipes, the timing is right. A long simmer is what breaks the oat starch down enough to thicken the water and give it body; cut it short and you get faintly oaty water with grit in the bottom.
- Stir and use a heavy panOat starch settles and catches on the base once the liquid begins to thicken. A heavy-bottomed saucepan, the lid ajar, and a stir every five minutes prevents a scorched taste that no amount of straining removes.
- StrainingA fine-mesh sieve is enough; press the solids with the back of a spoon to push through the thickened liquid rather than discarding it. Muslin gives a clearer drink but holds back most of the body.
- YieldThe pan starts with about five cups of liquid (a quart plus the cupful used to slake the oatmeal) and will have reduced somewhat after half an hour's boiling, giving two or three servings. Top up with boiling water if it thickens past drinking consistency.
- SeasoningSalt alone is the period treatment, and it does make the drink taste of something. A strip of lemon peel added for the last ten minutes, or a little sugar, is a reasonable modern liberty.
- KeepingIt thickens considerably as it cools and will gel in the refrigerator. Keep it no more than two days, covered, and thin with water before serving cold.
Oatmeal water belongs to the long tradition of "invalid cookery" — thin, strained, easily swallowed preparations kept for the sick, the convalescent and the very young, at a time when a fever meant weeks of liquid diet and nursing was done at home. Gruels and grain waters of this kind, made with oats, barley, rice or arrowroot, appear in nearly every nineteenth-century household manual, and toast water and barley water sat beside them on the same page. Oats were also cheap and kept well.