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Oatmeal Preparations
The oatmeal gruel and water are made after the same recipe as the barley where the prepared oat flour is used. They may however be made out of either the coarse oatmeal or the rolled oats. If the latter are used they should be prepared as described under "Cereals," and the following proportions observed:
Oatmeal Gruel-One-fourth cup rolled oats; one-third cup coarse oatmeal; one and one-half cups water.
Oatmeal Water-One and one-half tablespoons rolled oats; two tablespoons coarse oatmeal; two cups water.
Oatmeal Jelly-four tablespoons rolled oats; five and one-half tablespoons coarse oatmeal; one and one-half cups water.
Three dilutions of the same thing: gruel, oat water and oat jelly differ only in how much grain goes into the same cup and a half of water. The recipe is written as a set of proportions rather than a method, and it assumes you have already read the book's barley and cereal entries.
- Read the quantities as alternativesEach line gives a rolled-oat measure and a coarse-oatmeal measure for the same volume of water; the recipe says either may be used, so you use one or the other, not both. The coarse-oatmeal measure is the larger of the two in each case.
- What the two oats are"Coarse oatmeal" here is cut or pinhead oats, sold now as steel-cut or Irish oats. "Rolled oats" are old-fashioned flakes, not the instant kind, which will collapse into paste and give you no gradation between gruel and jelly.
- Cooking timesThe recipe gives none. In practice steel-cut oats in this much water want a covered double boiler or a very low burner for something like 45 minutes to an hour; rolled oats 20 to 30 minutes. Top up only if the pan threatens to go dry.
- Strain, and strain warmGruel and oat water are meant to be smooth liquids, so press the cooked grain through a fine sieve while hot. Oat jelly is strained the same way and then chilled; it sets from the oat starch alone, with no gelatine.
- Seasoning is left to youInvalid-cookery books of the period commonly called for a pinch of salt in the cooking and sugar, cream, or a spoon of sherry added at serving as the patient could tolerate it. Unseasoned oat water is genuinely unpleasant.
- "Prepared oat flour"The prepared oat flour the book cross-refers to is not sold under that description today. Fine oat flour will work for the strained versions and needs far less time over heat.
- YieldEach makes roughly a cupful after straining -- the oat water rather more, since it starts from two cups of water -- which is a single serving. Best used the day it is made; keep covered in the refrigerator, and the jelly will need to be whisked or rewarmed to be palatable again.
Oatmeal gruel, oatmeal water and oatmeal jelly are the same preparation held at three strengths, and the graduated system belongs to nineteenth-century sickroom nursing rather than to cookery proper. Household manuals of the period treated the fever patient's diet as a ladder: clear grain waters first, then thin gruels, then jellies and milk puddings, on the reasoning that starch strained free of husk and fibre demanded little of the stomach. Barley water was the standard of the genre, which is why this entry simply points back to it and adjusts the proportions. Butterick, a pattern company that expanded into domestic publishing, included a "Foods for Invalids" section because nursing at home was then ordinary household work, the sort of thing a cook book aimed at a housekeeper would be expected to cover. The oat versions carried a particular reputation for nourishment, a belief generally traced to Scottish and Northern English diet, where oats were the staple grain rather than a breakfast novelty.