Home › Seventh Day › Seventh Day: Arrowroot
Seventh Day: Arrowroot
No. 88. ARROWROOT GRUEL.
One oz. arrowroot, mixed smooth in cold milk and stirred into one pint boiling milk, with one heaping teaspoon sugar, and a pinch salt; stir until it is thick as cream, then cool a little, and serve.
No. 89.-ARROWROOT JELLY.
Wet two heaping teaspoonfuls Bermuda arrowroot in a little cold water, then stir into one cup boiling water, in which two teaspoonfuls white sugar have been dissolved. Stir until clear, boiling steadily, then add the lemon. Wet a cup with cold water and pour in the jelly to stiffen. To be eaten cold with sugar and cream. The same recipe, made with milk instead of water and one additional teaspoonful of arrowroot, makes a delicious blanc-mange. It must be boiled until well thickened. "Don't they always give sick people chicken-broth, Aunt Jane?" asked Mabel. "When the sick people begin to get well, they generally do, my dear," replied Mrs. King. "I am just coming to that receipt."
Two invalid-cookery standards plus a blancmange variation, all built on the same starch. The technique is unforgiving in one respect only: arrowroot thickens fast and then thins again if you keep cooking it.
- Do not overboilArrowroot thickens quickly once it reaches the boil and can thin again if cooked on. Pull the gruel off the heat as soon as it coats the spoon; for the jelly, stir only until it turns from milky to clear, noting that the recipe does direct steady boiling to that point.
- An ounce of arrowrootWeigh it if you can: 1 oz is 28 g, roughly three to four level tablespoons. Arrowroot is very light, so volume measures vary considerably depending on how it is scooped.
- "Then add the lemon"The original assumes an earlier instruction that is not on this page, so the quantity is genuinely unstated; the juice of half a lemon and a strip of rind per cup is a reasonable modern guess. Acid weakens starch thickening, so add it late.
- Bermuda arrowrootNineteenth-century cooks paid a premium for Bermuda-grown Maranta starch as the least adulterated grade. Modern packaged arrowroot starch or flour is the same thing; avoid substituting cornstarch, which tastes raw unless cooked longer and sets cloudy.
- Slake in cold liquid firstBoth recipes wet the starch before it meets heat, and this is not optional. Arrowroot dropped dry into boiling milk seizes into lumps that will not stir out.
- YieldThe gruel makes a pint, one generous invalid's serving or two small cups. The jelly makes a single cupful; the blancmange version sets firmer and unmoulds cleanly if the cup is rinsed with cold water as directed.
- Set and textureArrowroot sets softer than cornstarch and will not hold a finely detailed mould. Chill the jelly until set, and eat it the same day, as the surface tends to weep on standing.
- Milk and scorchingA pint of milk brought to the boil in a thin pan will catch. Use a heavy saucepan over moderate heat and stir the bottom, or set the mixture over simmering water as the period cook with a double boiler would have done.
Arrowroot was the sickroom starch of the nineteenth century, valued precisely because it was bland, easily digested and thought to burden the stomach less than wheat flour or oatmeal. The plant is Maranta arundinacea, a Caribbean and Central American rhizome whose washed, dried starch was exported in quantity from the West Indies and Bermuda; the name is often said to come from the plant's use on arrow wounds, though it may instead be a corruption of an Arawak word. Its appearance here, alongside chicken broth in the same conversation, marks this chapter as invalid cookery, a subject many domestic manuals of the period treated as a distinct branch of the art. The progression the aunt describes, from thin gruel to jelly to broth as the patient mends, was a common pattern in invalid diets of the day.