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Barley Gruel
The prepared flour is generally used for the barley preparations.
Wet one tablespoon of the flour, with one and one-half tablespoons of cold water. Pour on gradually, one and one-half cups of boiling water, stirring constantly, and boil hard one-half hour. Salt to taste. This is simply a water gruel; if milk is to be combined with it, omit one-half cup of the boiling water and add one-half cup of cold milk to the hot mixture when serving. Never heat the milk with the gruel. Strain gruel through a very fine sieve.
BARLEY WATER, No. I-Prepare exactly as gruel, but use two teaspoons of the barley flour to one pint of boiling water. BARLEY WATER, No. 2-Wash two tablespoons of pearl barley, and soak it for five hours in one quart of cold water. Cook steadily until it has boiled down to a pint. Strain twice.
A thin invalid gruel built on barley flour, with two versions of barley water alongside it. The quantities are small and the technique is the whole recipe.
- "Prepared flour"This means patent or prepared barley — finely milled barley flour, sold in the period as an infant and invalid food. Plain barley flour from a health food store or mill is the modern equivalent; it is not the same as barley malt or pearl barley.
- Slake before you pourWetting the tablespoon of flour with cold water first is the hinge. Boiling water hitting dry barley flour sets instant lumps that no amount of stirring will undo, and the sieve will take out the starch along with them.
- "Boil hard one-half hour"With this little flour in 1 1/2 cups of water, a hard half-hour boil on a modern burner risks scorching the pan and will reduce the volume sharply. Use a low simmer, stir often, or set the pan over simmering water; top up with boiling water to keep the volume.
- Never heat the milkThe instruction is deliberate. Milk boiled with a starchy gruel skins over, scorches, and was thought harder on a weak stomach; stirred in cold at the end it also brings the temperature down to something an invalid can drink at once.
- StrainingA very fine sieve or a double layer of muslin. The point is a liquid with no grain and no lumps — anything left behind on the sieve was not meant to be in it.
- Barley water No. 2 timingThe recipe gives no time, only the endpoint: reduce the quart to a pint. Over a steady simmer, uncovered, that will take an hour or more depending on the pan. Strain twice as directed; the second pass catches the fine sediment that clouds it.
- YieldThe gruel makes about one cup, a single serving. Barley water No. 2 gives a pint, as the recipe states. Keep either only a day, covered, in the refrigerator.
- SeasoningSalt to taste is all the original allows, in keeping with a sickroom diet. Barley water was commonly served with a strip of lemon peel added during cooking, or a little sugar and lemon juice stirred in afterward.
Barley water and barley gruel belong to a long tradition of "slops" — thin, strained, starchy liquids that were the standard nourishment for the sick, the very young and the convalescent well into the twentieth century. Barley's reputation as a cooling, soothing drink is generally traced to classical medicine, and many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household manuals carry a version. The "prepared" or "patent" barley called for here reflects a newer commercial layer: finely milled barley and other infant flours were sold by druggists and grocers, and a cookbook could assume a tin of it in the house. The straining twice, the unheated milk, and the small quantities say a good deal about the period's approach to nursing — food for an invalid was expected to be bland, fresh, and require almost nothing of the digestion.