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Wheat Flour Gruel
Mix one tablespoonful of salt in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir it into a smooth, thin paste with cold water; then mix in by degrees one breakfast cupful of boiling water, turn the mixture into a saucepan and stir it over the fire until well cooked, which will take about five minutes. Strain the gruel, sweeten it to taste, and if too thick, thin it with a little milk. The gruel may either be flavored with lemon juice or grated nutmeg, or a small piece of stick cinnamon may be boiled with it.
Cracked-Wheat Mush (American).
Brush lightly over the inside of a flat-bottomed, iron saucepan with a paste brush dipped in lard--it will require but little--pour in two quarts of water, and stand it over the fire. When boiling stir in one breakfast cupful of cracked wheat, and one teaspoonful of salt, keep stirring over the fire, and boil it for ten minutes; then move the saucepan to the side and keep the contents simmering, with the lid on, for three hours. As it is not the wheat itself that burns, but the flour mixed up with it, it would be better to wash it in two or three waters before boiling, as is done with rice. When sufficiently cooked, turn the mush into a bowl, and serve with a jug of cream.
Two invalid-cookery staples on one page: a thin flour gruel for someone who cannot manage solid food, and a long-simmered cracked-wheat porridge. Both are simple, but the quantities and timings need adjusting.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks wrong as printed -- a tablespoon of salt in a single cup of gruel is roughly 18 g in 8 oz of liquid, saltier than seawater and unpleasant to swallow. Whether it is a misprint or simply an error, treat it as a pinch to a quarter teaspoon; the sweetening and nutmeg that follow make little sense against a heavily salted base.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large cup, generally reckoned at about 8 to 10 fl oz. Use 1 cup and thin further with milk at the end as the recipe allows.
- Slake the flour cold, alwaysThis is the hinge of the gruel. The cold-water paste has to be smooth before any boiling water goes in, and the boiling water must be added in a thin stream while stirring, or the flour sets into lumps that no amount of straining will fix.
- Five minutes is shortFlour needs longer than that to lose its raw, pasty taste. Ten minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, gives a cleaner flavour, and the gruel will thicken slightly as it goes.
- StrainingPass it through a fine sieve rather than a colander. The point of straining is to catch flour specks, and the result should be pourable enough to drink from a cup.
- Greasing the panThe lard brushed round the iron saucepan is doing the job a nonstick or heavy-based pan does now. Skip it if your pan is sound; add a knob of butter if you like the flavour.
- Three hours is for old-style cracked wheatCoarse whole cracked wheat did take that long over a low fire. Modern cracked wheat cooks in 20 to 30 minutes and parboiled bulgur in 10 to 15. Check at 25 minutes and stop when the grains are tender and the mush has body.
- Washing the grainThe instruction is sound and still worth doing. Rinsing off loose flour dust prevents scorching on the bottom and gives a less gluey mush.
- YieldThe gruel makes one serving. The cracked-wheat mush, from 1 cup of grain and 2 quarts of water, makes four to six breakfast bowls; it will set firm when cold and can be sliced and fried, though this recipe does not mention doing so.
Gruels like this one belong to the sickroom rather than the dining room, and their presence in a grand hotel's book is a reminder that such a kitchen also had to feed guests who were unwell, elderly or convalescent. Nineteenth-century domestic manuals devoted whole chapters to invalid cookery, where thin flour, arrowroot, barley and oatmeal gruels were a standard first step back to solid food, flavoured with nutmeg, cinnamon or lemon because the underlying paste tastes of little. The cracked-wheat mush that follows is labelled "American", and cracked wheat and similar grains were indeed promoted in the United States from the mid-1800s onward as wholesome breakfast foods, with long simmering on the back of a range one common method before quicker parboiled grains shortened the job. The note that it is the loose flour, not the grain, that scorches is a genuine bit of range-cooking knowledge, from pans that had no thermostat and no way to spread heat evenly.