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Farina Gruel
To one quart of boiling water, slightly salted, add one tablespoonful of farina and cook slowly in a granite-ware saucepan or a double boiler three-quarters of an hour. Gruel can be made of farinose in the same manner. All gruels may be strained through a fine hair sieve, or a piece of muslin, if it is desirable to remove the particles of grain that may be in them.
A thin invalid's gruel rather than a porridge — one tablespoon of grain to a quart of water is a drink, not a cereal. A few notes on the materials and the method.
- FarinaFarina is finely milled wheat middlings, sold today as Cream of Wheat or plain "farina" hot cereal. Do not substitute semolina pasta flour, which is coarser and will not disperse the same way.
- FarinoseApparently one of the prepared wheat foods sold under trade names in this period; it is not something you will find now. Any fine wheat farina stands in for it; the recipe treats the two as interchangeable anyway.
- Granite-wareEnamelled sheet steel, valued because it did not react with food or scorch as readily as thin tin. Any heavy-bottomed nonreactive saucepan does the same job, and the double boiler remains the safer option for a 45-minute unattended cook.
- The hingeSprinkle the farina into the boiling water in a slow stream while stirring. Dumped in at once it clumps, and lumps are hard to stir out later.
- Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour is far longer than modern farina needs; today's product is cooked in a few minutes (quick versions) to about ten. The long slow cook presumably suited a gruel meant to be thin and easily swallowed, so shortening it changes the result.
- Water lossForty-five minutes in an open pan will reduce a quart noticeably. Cover it, or keep boiling water to hand and top up, or the gruel thickens past drinking consistency.
- StrainingA hair sieve was horsehair mesh; fine nylon mesh or a double layer of cheesecloth does the job. Strain while hot, as the gruel sets slightly on cooling.
- Yield and servingAbout three to four cups, two or three servings. The recipe itself calls for nothing but a little salt; such gruels were commonly drunk from a cup, and milk or cream, sugar, nutmeg or a spoon of sherry were sometimes added.
Gruels occupy a large corner of turn-of-the-century cookbooks not as breakfast for the household but as sickroom food, and the invalid ate at breakfast time like everyone else. Before intravenous feeding and commercial formulas, a nurse's repertoire was gruels, beef teas, barley water and milk toast, all of them simple and above all made without effort by the patient. Farina, generally described as a byproduct of roller-milling wheat that became widely available in the late nineteenth century, was marketed hard for exactly this use, and branded prepared wheat foods like the "farinose" mentioned here are often said to have proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, most of them long since absorbed or discontinued. The instruction about the hair sieve is a reminder of how much of this cooking was about texture: for a feverish patient, a single gritty particle of grain was reason enough to strain the whole quart.