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Indian Meal Gruel
One tablespoonful of cornmeal wet in cold water, and pour one quart of boiling water over it and boil gently one hour. Add salt while boiling.
A thin invalid gruel rather than a porridge: one tablespoon of meal to a quart of water is roughly a 1:60 ratio, and it will stay drinkable-thin no matter how long it cooks.
- Indian meal is cornmealThe title uses the older name, though the instruction itself already says cornmeal. Fine or medium yellow or white meal both work; coarse grits will not break down properly in an hour of gentle simmering.
- Slake it firstWetting the meal in cold water before the boiling water goes on is the hinge of the recipe. Dry meal dropped into boiling water seizes into lumps that never disperse.
- One hour is not excessiveLong, slow cooking is what turns raw corn starch into something smooth and digestible. Modern quick-cook cornmeal will thicken in twenty minutes, but the flavour of the full hour is different: rounder, less raw.
- Use a heavy pan and a low flameA quart reduced over an hour scorches easily at the bottom. A thick-bottomed saucepan, the lowest heat that keeps a lazy bubble going, and an occasional stir.
- Salt during, not afterAdding salt while it boils lets it distribute through the starch. Start with a scant quarter teaspoon for the quart and adjust; gruel this thin tastes of nothing if underseasoned.
- Yield and expected textureYou will finish with roughly two to three cups after evaporation. Expect it to remain very thin -- barely thickened, closer to a cloudy drink than to a cream -- since a single tablespoon of meal cannot body up that much water.
- ServingThe recipe gives no serving instruction; gruels of this kind were commonly taken hot, and milk or a little sugar are plausible additions. Strain it if any grit remains.
Cornmeal gruel belongs to the sickroom rather than the breakfast table proper. Thin grain gruels — of oatmeal, barley, arrowroot or Indian meal — were a standard first food given to convalescents, the very young and the very old, on the reasoning that long-boiled starch was gentle on the stomach. "Indian meal" was an older English and American name for maize meal, distinguishing it from wheat flour, and it persisted in cookery writing alongside "cornmeal" — as this recipe's own title and text show. The recipe's extreme thinness looks deliberate: a tablespoon of meal to a quart of water is closer to medicine measured out than to a meal.