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Oatmeal Gruel
1½ cups boiled water . 1 teaspoon salt Add oatmeal mixed with salt to boiling water. Boil two minutes. Cook in double boiler one hour. Strain, bring to boiling point and add milk or cream to thin.
A thin, strained oat drink from the invalid-cookery chapter, meant to be sipped rather than eaten. The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original printing: read it as 2 tablespoons oatmeal, 1½ cups boiling water, and salt.
- The salt is out of proportionA teaspoon of salt in 1½ cups of liquid is around half the salinity of seawater, and will still overwhelm 2 tablespoons of oats. A saltspoon (about ¼ teaspoon) is the more usual quantity in invalid recipes of this kind; start there and taste.
- Which oatmealThe hour in the double boiler suggests coarse or steel-cut oats rather than rolled, though the recipe does not specify. Rolled oats will work but break down faster and give a cloudier, starchier gruel, and will need considerably less time.
- The double boiler is the pointDirect heat scorches a starch this thin, and scorched oat is unmistakable in something meant for a sick person. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and the upper pan covered so it does not reduce away.
- StrainingPush it through a fine sieve with the back of a spoon rather than simply pouring it off; the strained liquid should be smooth enough to drink from a cup, with the spent oats discarded.
- Reheating after the milkBring the strained gruel back to the boil before the milk or cream goes in, then warm it gently. Boiling it again after the dairy is added invites a skin and a catch on the bottom.
- YieldProbably around a cupful after straining and thinning, a single serving, though the recipe gives no yield. It thickens noticeably as it stands, so hold back some of the milk to loosen it at the last moment.
Gruel is oat porridge taken past the point of thickness into drinkability, and it was standard sickroom fare in English and American households for centuries before it reached this book. The distinction generally drawn at the time, though more a tendency than a formal rule, was between porridge, which was food, and gruel, which was closer to a medicine: strained free of solids so that a patient with no appetite and a weak stomach could take something nourishing by the spoonful. An entire section called Invalid Cookery was ordinary in general cookbooks of the era, sitting alongside beef tea, barley water, albumenized milk and milk toast. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given to policyholders, part of the company's own health-education work promoting domestic hygiene and sound feeding among its customers, so a chapter on how to feed the sick at home was very much to the publisher's purpose.