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Barley Jelly
Prepare as barley gruel, using two tablespoons of flour and two cups of boiling water. Strain into a mold, chill, and serve with sugar and cream.
A starch-set jelly from the invalid-cookery chapter, and one that depends entirely on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book. The instruction "prepare as barley gruel" means long, slow cooking of barley flour in water until the starch is fully swollen.
- What "flour" means hereBarley flour, not wheat. Barley flour was sold specifically for sickroom gruels; modern barley flour from a health-food shop or mill works, though it is coarser and more assertively nutty than the fine white barley flour of 1911.
- Ratio and setTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of water is a thin gruel by modern standards and will set only softly, if at all. The recipe itself says nothing about reduction; expect something closer to a loose pudding than a sliceable jelly unless you cook it down by a third.
- Cook the starch outThe hinge of the dish. Barley flour paste tastes raw and pasty until the starch granules have burst — a good twenty to thirty minutes at a bare simmer, stirred often.
- Mix cold, then heatSlake the flour with a few tablespoons of cold water to a smooth cream before it meets the boiling water, or it will lump instantly and the straining step will remove most of your thickener.
- StrainingA fine sieve is enough; the point is to catch bran specks and any lumps, not to clarify. Press the solids through rather than discarding them.p
- Season itThe recipe gives no salt. A pinch dissolved during cooking is what separates barley jelly from wallpaper paste, and the sugar and cream go on at the table.
- Mold and chillRinse the mold in cold water and do not grease it. Two to three hours in the refrigerator; the original assumed an icebox or a cold larder, and a warm room will leave it slack.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid makes one or two small invalid portions — a teacup each. Scale up rather than expecting a dessert for a table.
Barley water and barley gruel were the backbone of nineteenth-century sickroom feeding, prescribed for fevers, digestive complaints and convalescence long before anyone could say why they helped; the appeal was that they were bland, warm, mildly nourishing and easy to swallow. Setting the same gruel in a mold and turning it out cold with sugar and cream was a small act of kindness, a way of making an invalid's fourth day of barley look like a dessert rather than a dose. Butterick, a pattern company that had expanded into general domestic publishing, gave its cook book a full "Foods for Invalids" section, and the household cook was expected to know what to send up on a tray. The technique is pure starch cookery: no gelatine, no eggs, just cereal starch swollen in water and allowed to firm as it cools, which is the same principle behind blancmange and cornstarch pudding.