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Rice Gruel
1 tablespoon rice. 1 cup milk Wash rice, cover with cold water and let stand two hours. Drain, add milk and cook one and one-half hours in double boiler. Strain and season. Serve hot or cold. 2 tablespoons rice (Salt for seasoning
A thin milk-and-rice drink from the invalid-cookery chapter, meant to be swallowed rather than chewed. The ingredient list has been scrambled in printing: it is 2 tablespoons rice, 1 cup milk, and salt.
- Scale and yieldTwo tablespoons of rice to one cup of milk is a single serving; expect somewhat less than a cup once the rice is strained out. If you want a full cup, start with a little extra milk.
- The riceUse a plain white short- or medium-grain rice. Modern parboiled or converted rice resists breaking down and will not give up the starch that makes the gruel; brown rice will not soften enough in the time given.
- Why the cold soakTwo hours in cold water swells the grain so it disintegrates in the milk rather than staying whole. It is not a rinse for cleanliness; the recipe calls for washing the rice separately, before the soak.
- Double boiler is not optionalMilk held at a simmer for ninety minutes over direct heat will scorch and skin. The water bath keeps the milk below boiling. Top up the lower pan; an hour and a half will boil a small one dry.
- StrainingPress the cooked rice through a fine sieve rather than just pouring off the liquid. The point is a smooth, faintly thickened liquid carrying the rice starch, not clear milk.
- SeasoningSalt only, as written. Other invalid-cookery recipes of the period allow a little sugar, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream, though this one does not.
- Serving and keepingServe hot in a cup; the recipe also allows it cold. Chilled it will thicken somewhat and may want thinning with a little milk. Being a cooked dairy dish, it should be refrigerated and used within a day.
Nearly every general cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried a chapter of "invalid cookery" or "food for the sick," because long convalescence at home was ordinary and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, fed the patient. Gruels were the backbone of it: a grain cooked far past the point of texture and then strained, so that the sick person got starch and, here, milk protein without any work of chewing or digesting solids. Rice specifically was recommended in cases of stomach and bowel trouble, being regarded as the blandest and most binding of the grains. The dish belongs to the same family as barley water, arrowroot gruel and beef tea, all of them thin, warm and deliberately dull.