Put four quarts of water or broth into a saucepan, let boil, and dredge in a shower while stirring one pound either of oatmeal or wheaten grits; let cook for thirty minutes, pass it through a tammy, and add either more water or some broth, so as to obtain a clear puree fit to be drank easily from a cup, without using a spoon; a little salt and butter may be added.
A thin drinking gruel from the invalid-cookery chapter of Ranhofer's The Epicurean. The technique is simple; the two things that decide whether it works are how the grain goes into the pot and how thoroughly it is strained.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, closed the soup chapters of The Epicurean (1894) with a run of broths and purees for invalids, a standard feature of nineteenth-century professional cookbooks: the same kitchen that sent out canvasback duck was expected to send a tray upstairs to someone who could not chew. Grain gruels were the backbone of that cookery. Thin oatmeal or barley water, strained until smooth enough to drink from a cup rather than eat from a spoon, was the near-universal sickroom food across Britain, France and America, valued because it was bland, warm, and could be got down a patient who could manage nothing else. The insistence that it be drinkable without a spoon is not fussiness; a bedridden invalid propped on pillows can drink but struggles to eat, and the tammy exists to make that possible. The French title places the dish in the same register as the chicken and game purees on either side of it — hospital food dressed in restaurant French.