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Milk Porridge
Take one tablespoonful of flour, mix it quite smooth with one breakfast cupful of water, taking care to see that there are no lumps left; put this into a good thick saucepan and add to it one breakfast cupful of milk, one teaspoonful of salt and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Place it on the stove and keep stirring until it boils; allow it to boil for ten minutes or so, and it is then ready to serve.
A flour-and-milk gruel of the sort kept on hand for invalids and children. It comes together in fifteen minutes and depends entirely on the slurry being lump-free before any heat touches it.
- The hinge: slurry firstWhisk the flour into the cold water until perfectly smooth before the milk goes in and before the pan meets the burner. Flour added to warm milk seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will undo.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, larger than a teacup. Treating it as a standard 8 oz cup gives one cup water, one cup milk, and the proportions hold.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt in two cups of thin porridge reads as very salty to a modern palate. A quarter teaspoon is closer to current taste.
- The ten-minute boilThat length is not excessive here. Flour needs sustained heat to lose its raw, pasty taste, and the starch has to gelatinize fully. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly once it thickens, or the milk solids will catch on the bottom.
- A good thick saucepanHeavy-bottomed is the point. Thin pans scorch milk starches quickly, and scorched flour porridge tastes of nothing else.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of liquid yields something closer to a thin drinkable cream than a spoonable porridge. Add a second tablespoon if you want body.
- YieldAbout two cups, serving one as a full bowl or two as a small cup each.
Milk porridge belongs to the long tradition of "invalid cookery" -- bland, warm, easily digested dishes prepared for the sick, the elderly, the very young, and the convalescent, and a standard section in nineteenth-century household manuals. Its ancestors are the water gruels and flour paps of British and colonial kitchens, thinned starch cooked in milk being about the gentlest thing a household could produce. Nutmeg is a common period finish for dishes made with milk, as in English possets and puddings.