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Oatmeal Gruel
Boil two-thirds of a cup of well-cooked oatmeal in one cup of boiling water fifteen minutes, or until the grains are very soft. Add an equal amount of milk, a few grains of salt, and a grating of nutmeg. A little cream is an improvement. It may be served strained or unstrained, as desired.
A thrifty invalid dish built from yesterday's porridge, and one of the few recipes where thin consistency is the goal rather than a fault.
- Start with cooked oatmealThe two-thirds cup is already-cooked porridge, not dry oats. Cold leftover oatmeal will be set solid; break it up with a fork or whisk before it goes into the water or you will spend the whole fifteen minutes chasing lumps.
- What "gruel" means hereThis is deliberately thin — pourable from a cup, not spoonable. If it thickens toward porridge as it cooks, let it down with more boiling water. It should coat a spoon and slide straight off.
- Fifteen minutes is not too longModern oat cooking times assume rolled oats and a firm texture. Here the point is to break the grain down completely so the starch goes into suspension, which is what makes gruel easy to digest. Stir now and then; oat starch catches on the bottom of a thin pan.
- Milk goes in off the heatMilk goes in at the end -- "An equal amount" is ambiguous: it may mean a cup, to match the water, or two-thirds of a cup, to match the oatmeal. The recipe does not say whether to boil it further; milk boiled with oat starch scorches quickly and skins over, so warming through is the safer reading.
- StrainingThe recipe leaves it to preference. Strained gruel is the version usually associated with the sick or with infants; pushing it through a fine sieve leaves a smooth, almost creamy liquid and holds back the coarser solids. Unstrained is simply thin porridge.
- YieldAbout two cups. Salt lightly -- "a few grains" is meant literally, though a modern palate will want a proper pinch.
- Steel-cut versus rolledLeftover steel-cut oats give a better gruel than rolled, holding more body after long boiling. Instant oatmeal collapses to paste almost immediately and needs far less than fifteen minutes.
Gruel occupies a peculiar place in nineteenth-century English and American households: it was the standard food of the sickroom, the nursery and the workhouse all at once, which is why it carries such a bleak literary reputation and yet turns up in respectable cookbooks without apology. The logic behind it was sound enough — long boiling breaks starch granules down into something a weak stomach can absorb, and diluting with milk adds fat and protein without asking much of the digestion. That it appears in a book about left-overs is the whole point of such volumes, which were written in a period when a household that threw out a bowl of cooked oatmeal was thought to be leaking money. Nutmeg, grated fresh over the top, was a common flavouring for invalid milk dishes — gruel, posset, junket — and was held at the time to settle the stomach as well as season it.