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Browned Flour Gruel
Brown flour by placing it in a shallow pan in the oven and stirring occasionally until it is scorched to a uniform • brown color. Then prepare the same as white flour gruel.
The whole recipe is the browning; the rest is a cross-reference to the plain flour gruel earlier in the chapter. Both halves need a little filling in for a modern cook.
- What the gruel itself isA flour gruel of this period is roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of flour whisked smooth into a cup of cold water or milk, simmered gently with a pinch of salt until it thickens and loses any raw taste. Thin gruel used the smaller amount, thick gruel the larger.
- Oven for browningUse 300-325F and a wide, heavy pan so the layer is shallow. Stir every few minutes and pull it at an even light-to-medium coffee brown; the book's word "scorched" overstates it, and genuinely burnt flour turns the gruel bitter and grey.
- Browning is faster on the stoveA dry skillet over medium-low heat does the same job in 10-15 minutes with constant stirring, which is easier to judge than an oven. Either way the flour goes from white to sand to tan; the smell shifts to something like toasted nuts.
- It thickens lessToasting breaks down the starch, so browned flour has noticeably weaker thickening power. Expect to use half again as much as you would white flour for the same body, and judge by eye rather than by the original measure.
- LumpsSlake the browned flour in a little cold liquid to a smooth paste before adding the rest, and whisk while it comes to a simmer.
- Cooking timeSimmer 15-20 minutes, stirring, over low heat or in a double boiler. Old directions sometimes call for an hour; that is unnecessary here, though a longer gentle cook does smooth the texture.
- Yield and servingOne cup of liquid makes a single invalid's serving. Season with salt, and if it is being eaten for pleasure rather than for the sickroom, a little cream, sugar, or a scrape of nutmeg is in keeping with the period.
- Make it in quantityBrowned flour keeps for months in a sealed jar, so brown a cup or two at once. It is also the base for the browned-flour thickenings and sauce colourings used elsewhere in books of this era.
Browned flour was a fixture of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery. Toasting was thought to render the starch more digestible and less "pasty" — a belief with some basis, since dry heat converts part of the starch to dextrins, which is also why the gruel thickens less — and browned-flour gruel was a standard offering for convalescents and for children and adults recovering from bowel complaints, often said to be binding as well as nourishing. The same toasted flour did double duty in the savoury kitchen, where it coloured and flavoured gravies without the fat of a cooked roux.