Home › Food For The Sick › Food for the Sick
Food for the Sick
CRUST COFFEE. -Toast bread very brown, pour on boiling water, strain and add cream and sugar and nutmeg, if desired. cream and sugar and nutmeg, if desired.
CREAM SOUP.-One pint boiling water, half tea-cup cream; add broken pieces of toasted bread and a little salt. of toasted bread and a little salt.
WINE WHEY. -One pint of boiling milk, two wine-glasses of wine, boil a moment, stirring well; take out the curd, sweeten and flavor the whey.
Three invalid drinks from the sickroom chapter, each built on the assumption that a patient can take liquid but not much else. All are quick, and all depend on proportions the original states loosely.
- A wine-glass is about 2 fl ozThe standard nineteenth-century wine-glass measure is two fluid ounces, so "two wine-glasses of wine" is roughly half a cup. A tea-cup is generally smaller than a modern cup, though period sources vary considerably -- anywhere from about four to eight fluid ounces.
- Crust coffee contains no coffeeThe name refers only to the colour and the bitter roasted note. Bread is toasted until genuinely dark brown, almost scorched, then steeped in boiling water like tea and strained. Toast that is merely golden gives a weak, bready liquid with none of the point.
- Toast it dark, but not blackThe hinge of crust coffee is the degree of browning. Carbonised black toast turns the drink acrid; aim for a deep uniform brown across the whole surface, and use a plain white loaf rather than anything sweetened or seeded.
- Steeping timeThe recipe gives none. Five to ten minutes covered is enough to draw the colour and flavour; longer and the crumb disintegrates and clouds the strained liquid.
- Cream soup is a panada, not a soupBoiling water plus a half tea-cup of cream and broken toast makes a thin milky gruel that thickens as the bread softens. Serve it at once; standing turns it to paste.
- Wine whey separates on purposeThe acid and alcohol in the wine coagulate the hot milk. Bring the milk just to a boil, stir the wine in, hold it a few seconds only, then strain through muslin. Prolonged boiling gives tough, rubbery curd and a cloudy whey.
- Which wineThe recipe specifies none; a dry sherry, madeira or plain white wine works, and sherry or madeira turn up often in period whey receipts. Anything heavily tannic or sweet will dominate what is meant to be a mild drink, and the alcohol is not fully driven off by a moment's boiling.
- YieldCrust coffee gives no quantities. Cream soup and wine whey each start from a pint of liquid, so both make appreciably more than a single cup; wine whey shrinks noticeably once the curd is lifted out.
Sickroom cookery had its own small canon, and these three are all in it: bulk without work for the stomach, warmth, and something faintly flavoured to relieve a diet of broth. Crust coffee belongs to a family of coffee substitutes made from toasted bread, roasted grain, chicory and acorns, drunk both by the poor and by patients forbidden real coffee. Whey posset and wine whey are older still, appearing in English domestic manuals long before this book, and were valued because the curd, thought hard to digest, was strained away and discarded. That a general-purpose cookbook devoted a chapter to Food for the Sick reflects a period when nursing happened at home and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, was expected to know what to send upstairs on a tray.