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Seventh Day: Gruel
No. 80-INDIAN MEAL GRUEL.
Mix two tablespoonfuls white Indian meal into a thin paste with cold water; stir this into a quart of boiling water, in which has been dissolved one teaspoonful salt; boil it four hours, stir a teaspoonful wheat flour into a cupful of boiling milk (first, of course, mixing it smoothly in a little cold milk), let it boil up once, then add it to the Indian meal and let all boil up once together. If too thick, it is nourishing and tasteful thinned with cream, or if wanted plain, with boiling water.
No. 81-PLAIN GRUEL.
Two quarts boiling water; into which stir one cup Indian meal and one tablespoon flour, previously made into a smooth paste with cold water. Boil slowly one hour. A handful of raisins boiled in the gruel improves it, especially for children's taste. No. 82-OATMEAL GRUEL.
Mix two tablespoonfuls oatmeal with three of cold water; pour on one pint boiling water, then boil five minutes, stirring all the time; skim, and strain through a hair-sieve. Farina gruel is made in the same way.
No. 83-RICE GRUEL.
Mix two tablespoonfuls ground rice smooth with cold water, stir it into a pint of boiling milk; boil until it is as thick as good cream; sweeten to taste, and grate in a little nutmeg. "In every recipe where meal of any kind is stirred into boiling milk," said Mrs. King, "it is better to pour the milk into the dish containing the meal, then turn the whole back into the saucepan. It is very difficult to keep porridge from getting lumpy if you stir in the flour while the milk is over the fire."
No. 84-IMITATION OF ASSES' MILK.
Put into a saucepan one half-pint milk and the same of water; while they are coming to a boil, beat up two eggs very light, yolks and whites together; pour the boiling mixture on the egg, but do not boil afterwards; sweeten with white sugar-candy.
No. 85-PANADA.
A page of sickroom cookery rather than dinner cookery: thin, strained cereal drinks meant for invalids, infants and convalescents. Most of it still works, but No. 84 does not, and the cornmeal timings belong to a different grind of meal.
- No. 84 is the problemNo. 84 -- A pint of boiling milk and water poured onto two beaten eggs, with no further cooking, gives no guarantee that the eggs reach and hold a safe temperature: the mixture is never returned to the heat, and how hot it ends up depends on how fast it is poured and how cold the eggs and dish are. If you are cooking for an invalid, an infant or anyone else vulnerable, use pasteurised egg or a custard recipe that specifies a finished temperature. The rest of the page is sound.
- Indian mealCornmeal. "White Indian meal" is white cornmeal, milled from white dent corn and still sold in the American South; yellow works but changes the colour and flavour the recipe is after.
- The four-hour boilThat timing probably reflects a coarser, stone-ground meal than modern supermarket cornmeal, and a kitchen with a slow fire always going. Fine modern meal thickens in well under an hour and can scorch over a long boil. Use a double boiler or the lowest possible flame, and judge by texture rather than the clock.
- Ground riceNot rice flour as sold for baking, though it is the closest substitute — ground rice is a slightly grittier grind. Two tablespoons into a pint of milk gives a very thin pudding; expect it to thicken further as it cools.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh sieve woven from horsehair, the standard fine strainer before cheap wire mesh. A fine nylon or stainless strainer does the same job. Straining is not optional for the oatmeal gruel — the whole point is a smooth drinkable liquid.
- Oatmeal, five minutesThis works only with fine oatmeal, not rolled oats or coarse pinhead meal, which need longer and will not pass a sieve cleanly. Farina, mentioned as an alternative, is the wheat cereal sold under brands such as Cream of Wheat.
- Sugar-candyLarge sugar crystals grown from a concentrated syrup — chemically ordinary sucrose. Plain granulated sugar is the equivalent.
- Mrs. King's lump ruleHer instruction is the most useful line on the page and applies to any starch-in-milk cooking: pour the hot liquid onto the meal off the heat, then return everything to the pan. Stirring dry starch into milk already on the fire sets the outside of each grain before the inside hydrates.
- YieldNo. 81 makes about two quarts — a household batch. Nos. 82 and 83 each make a pint, roughly two servings of a drink meant to be sipped warm.
Gruel belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery," a fixed section in nearly every domestic manual of the period, on the grounds that someone in the house would eventually be ill. Teaching girls to feed the sick was considered as basic as teaching them to make bread. "Indian meal" is the old American term for maize meal, from Indian corn, distinguishing it from the grain an English speaker would have meant by "corn" — a usage that survives in Indian pudding. The imitation asses' milk points at something older still: asses' milk was prescribed for consumptives across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, being closer to human milk than cow's, and cookbooks carried imitations for households that could not keep or hire a donkey.