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Indian Meal Gruel
Take one quart of boiling water; onehalf teaspoon of salt; two tablespoons of meal; one tablespoon of flour; four tablespoons of cold water. Place the meal and flour in the cold water, rub them smooth, and stir the paste into the boiling water.
Stir well, and when the gruel boils, set it back where it will simmer gently for two hours. Add the salt, cook for one-half hour longer, and serve with cream or milk, the same as in the preceding recipe.
PANADA-Sprinkle one teaspoon of salt between two large Boston, soda or graham crackers or hard pilot biscuit. Place the crackers in a bowl, and pour on just enough boiling water to soak them well. Set the bowl in a vessel of boiling water, and let it remain twenty or thirty minutes, until the crackers are quite clear, but not at all broken; then lift them out carefully without breaking and lay them on a hot saucer. Serve very hot with sugar and cream.
A thin cornmeal gruel from the sickroom chapter, plus a cracker panada tacked on at the end. Both are deliberately bland and very soft; the technique is worth knowing even if the intent is not.
- Indian meal is cornmealIn American books of this period "Indian meal" generally means cornmeal, as opposed to wheat flour. Fine or medium yellow or white meal both work; coarse stone-ground grits will not thicken the same way.
- This is very thin on purposeTwo tablespoons of meal and one of flour to a full quart of water gives something closer to a drinkable broth than porridge. Gruels this thin were often sipped from a cup rather than eaten with a spoon.
- Slurry first, and no lumpsThe hinge is rubbing the meal and flour smooth in the four tablespoons of cold water before it meets the boiling water. Dry meal dropped into hot liquid seizes instantly into lumps that two hours of simmering will not disperse.
- Two and a half hours of simmeringTwo hours, then a further half hour after the salt goes in. That length seems to have less to do with thickening than with softening the meal thoroughly. Use the lowest burner setting with a heat diffuser, or set the pan in a larger pan of simmering water, and stir occasionally; cornmeal at this dilution scorches on the bottom before you smell it.
- Expect reductionLeft uncovered for two and a half hours, a quart will lose a good deal of volume. Cover the pan loosely, or top up with boiling water to keep the consistency you want. The finished quantity might serve two to four as a drink.
- The salt going in lateSalt added near the end is a period habit, sometimes explained as keeping the grain from hardening. Adding it at the start does no harm; taste at the end either way, since half a teaspoon in a quart is barely seasoned.
- The panada crackers"Pilot biscuit" was hard ship's bread; "Boston crackers" were large, plain, unsweetened crackers. Nothing in a modern packet is quite as sturdy; unsalted matzo or a plain water biscuit is closest. Ordinary saltines will disintegrate long before twenty minutes.
- Panada methodThe bowl sits in a pan of boiling water, so the crackers steam through gently rather than churning in liquid. "Quite clear" means translucent all the way through. Lift with a wide spatula, not a spoon.
Gruels, panadas and beef teas filled the invalid-cookery chapters of household manuals well into the First World War era, when nursing the sick at home was ordinary domestic work. The logic was that a fevered or convalescent patient could take only liquids and starches, so a cook needed half a dozen ways to make a cup of thin cooked grain taste of something. Cornmeal was the cheapest and most American of those grains, and "Indian meal" is the older name, distinguishing native maize from imported wheat flour. Panada, from the Latin for bread, is the same idea one step further along: bread or hard biscuit softened in hot liquid, a preparation recorded in English cookery for centuries and still used for babies and the toothless as much as for the ill. Such chapters served as practical reference rather than as cooking for pleasure.