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Oatmeal Gruel
Take two tablespoons of oatmeal, pour on it a pint of cold water; let it stand half a day, then pour it through a sieve and boil well one-quarter of an hour, stirring all the time; season according to taste. The coarse meal to be rejected. Good for invalids or children.
A thin invalid drink rather than a porridge: the soaking draws starch out of the meal, the meal itself is discarded, and what you boil is the cloudy water. Worth knowing before you wonder where the oats went.
- The hinge: strain, do not pressPour the steeped mixture through the sieve and let it drain; if you push the solids through you get a lumpy porridge instead of the smooth starch liquor intended. "The coarse meal to be rejected" is the whole method in one line.
- Which oatmealIn the period this recipe comes from, oatmeal meant stone-ground meal or steel-cut groats, which shed starch readily into cold water. Rolled oats work but give a weaker liquor; instant oats dissolve into sludge and defeat the straining step.
- QuantitiesA pint here is likely the imperial pint (20 fl oz) rather than the US 16 fl oz, so err on the generous side. Two tablespoons of meal to a pint of water gives a thin liquor; the recipe does not say how much it yields or how many it serves.
- Half a day of soakingRead literally this is about twelve hours, though a shorter soak of several hours will draw starch out; overnight in the refrigerator does the same job and is the safer habit in a warm kitchen. If it smells sour, start again.
- The quarter hour of boilingUnusually, the long time is correct here. Fifteen minutes of steady simmering with constant stirring is what gelatinises the starch and thickens the liquid; cut it short and you have cloudy water. Use a heavy pan and keep the heat moderate, since thin starch scorches fast.
- "Season according to taste"The recipe leaves this open. Period gruel recipes commonly suggest a pinch of salt, sometimes sugar, nutmeg, a spoonful of cream, or a little lemon and sherry for adults. Salt alone makes the difference between bland and drinkable.
- ServingServe hot, and thin with a little hot water or milk if it sets too stiff on standing — it thickens noticeably as it cools.
Gruel is the ancestor of the whole English sickroom diet: a starch liquor, easily swallowed and easily digested, standing in for food when a patient could manage nothing solid. Oatmeal was the cheap staple grain of Scotland and northern England, and thin oat gruel travelled with it into nineteenth-century North American household manuals, where it sat alongside barley water, beef tea and arrowroot in the chapters written for invalids and infants. The instruction to reject the meal is consistent with the era's medical advice that bran and coarse particles irritated a weak stomach — nutritionally backwards by modern lights. Its appearance in a community cookbook of this kind is a reminder that these books were expected to cover nursing as well as dinner, illness being managed largely at home rather than in hospital.