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Arrowroot
Put one spoonful of arrowroot in cold water, and pour boiling water over it. Add salt, lemon juice and sugar.
A one-cup invalid gruel of the kind that filled the back pages of Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks. It works, but only if the starch is handled correctly.
- The hinge: the slurryThe arrowroot must be worked smooth in one or two tablespoons of cold water before any boiling water touches it. Dropped dry into hot liquid it seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will smooth out.
- "One spoonful"The recipe fixes neither the spoon nor the amount of water. A rounded tablespoon to roughly a cup of water gives a pourable gruel; a teaspoon would give little more than cloudy water, and a much heavier hand a stiff paste.
- Boiling water is not enough on its ownBoiling water may not be enough on its own -- Arrowroot gelatinises at a lower temperature than cornstarch, somewhere around 150-170F, so water straight from the kettle, stirred hard, will usually do it. If the mixture stays milky rather than turning clear and glossy, return it to low heat briefly.
- Do not keep it cookingUnlike flour or cornstarch, arrowroot thins again if held at a boil. Once it clears, take it off the heat.
- Add the lemon lastThe recipe adds the juice after the boiling water, and that is the sensible order: prolonged cooking with acid can thin a starch gel, though arrowroot tolerates acid better than most starches. Sugar and a pinch of salt go in at the same time; sweeten to taste.
- Serve at onceOn standing it skins over and stiffens, and reheating slackens it. Made in this quantity it is a single portion and does not hold.
Arrowroot is the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, a tropical American plant grown commercially in the West Indies; Bermuda and St. Vincent arrowroot were the grades most often specified by nineteenth-century cooks, and St. Vincent supplied the bulk of the British and American trade. Its reputation rested on being exceptionally bland and easily digested, which made it the standard thickener of sickroom and nursery cookery. The name is generally traced to the plant's use in drawing poison from arrow wounds, though it may equally be a corruption of an Arawak word; either explanation is traditional rather than settled. Cornstarch, cheaper and domestically milled, eventually displaced it in American kitchens.