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Oatmeal Gruel
Mix two tablespoonfuls of oatmeal to a paste by adding three tablespoonfuls of water; stir in three breakfast cupfuls of milk or water, pour it into a saucepan over a slow fire, and cook for half an hour. When it is done turn it into a basin, and serve. It may be strained if thought necessary.
A thin invalid's gruel rather than a bowl of porridge — the ratio here is roughly 1 part oatmeal to 24 parts liquid. A few notes on translating it.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, usually reckoned at somewhere around 8 to 10 fl oz. Three of them is roughly 3 to 3¾ cups of liquid, which against two tablespoons of oatmeal gives a drinkable gruel, not a porridge.
- Which oatmealPeriod recipes of this kind assume fine or medium ground oatmeal, closer to today's oat flour or fine pinhead meal than to rolled oats. Rolled oats will thicken less and leave visible flakes; the recipe's optional straining would deal with either flakes or lumps, though it gives no reason for offering it.
- Slow fireThe lowest burner setting, with the pan barely trembling. Gruel scorches on the bottom the moment it is left alone; stir often, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water.
- The paste firstSlaking the meal in cold water before the milk goes in is the hinge of the method. Tip dry meal into hot liquid and it seizes into lumps that no amount of cooking will smooth out.
- Half an hourNot padding. Fine oatmeal needs the full time at low heat to lose its raw, chalky taste and for the starch to swell into the liquid. Milk versions want more attention than water versions.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. For the table it wants salt, and gruels of this kind were often finished with sugar, a little butter, cream, or a spoonful of sherry or brandy.
- YieldAbout three cups, one generous serving or two small ones. It thickens noticeably as it cools and can be let down with more hot milk or water.
Gruel occupies a peculiar place in a book from the Waldorf-Astoria, a hotel better known for terrapin and canvasback duck. Invalid cookery — beef tea, barley water, arrowroot, gruels — appears in cookbooks of the period alongside the showier dishes. Oatmeal gruel is among the plainest of these, a thin drinkable version of the oat pottage that fed northern Britain for centuries, reduced by the nineteenth century to a sickroom staple and to the workhouse ration that gave the word its Dickensian associations. Its virtues were that it was cheap, digestible, and could be made from a store cupboard.