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Oatmeal Gruel (Into one quart of boiling)
Into one quart of boiling water, slightly, salted, sprinkle slowly, stirring meanwhile, one-fourth of a cupful of oatmeal,and cook slowly two hours in a granite-ware saucepan or a double boiler. Gruels may be made from rolled wheat, barley, and some other cereals in a similar manner.
A sickroom gruel rather than a bowl of porridge: the ratio here is roughly one part oatmeal to sixteen parts water, so the result is a thin drinkable liquid, not a spoonable cereal.
- The oatmeal meant hereWhen this book was printed, "oatmeal" without qualification generally meant coarse or medium ground meal, or steel-cut groats; the recipe names rolled wheat separately as an alternative. Steel-cut oats will hold up over the long cooking; rolled oats break down into paste well before two hours.
- Two hours is not a misprintLong, slow cooking was the point: it burst the starch completely so the liquid would be smooth and easily digested. With steel-cut meal in a double boiler the time is reasonable. Modern quick-cooking oats break down far faster and need only a fraction of that time.
- Granite-wareEnamelled steel, valued because it did not react with food. Any heavy non-reactive pan does the same job; the double boiler is the safer choice, since a thin starch mixture over direct heat catches on the bottom.
- Sprinkle slowlyThe hinge of the recipe. Adding the meal in a slow stream into boiling water while stirring prevents lumps, which are hard to stir out afterwards. If lumps do form, gruel was often pressed through a fine sieve.
- Salt"Slightly salted" implies no more than a small pinch, perhaps a quarter teaspoon per quart -- enough to keep it from tasting flat, no more. Gruel was meant to be bland.
- Yield and servingSomewhat under a quart, depending on how much evaporates; thinned further with hot water or milk to taste. Period invalid cookery often served gruel in a cup, sometimes with a little cream, sugar, nutmeg or a spoonful of wine or brandy stirred in.
- KeepingIt thickens considerably as it cools and will need whisking and diluting when reheated. Being a starch-and-water preparation with nothing to preserve it, it was made fresh; refrigerate and use within a couple of days.
Gruel occupies a strange place in the old cookbooks — often taken for a breakfast dish, but really a piece of invalid cookery, the thin cereal drink given to the sick, the very old, the newly delivered and infants being weaned. Nineteenth-century domestic manuals commonly carry a version, along with barley water, beef tea and arrowroot, in the belief that a convalescent stomach could handle liquid starch when it could handle nothing else. Oats were the usual base in Britain and the northern United States, where oatmeal was cheap and everywhere; the note that wheat, barley "and some other cereals" work the same way reflects a genuinely interchangeable technique rather than any particular tradition. The word itself comes through Old French gruel, meaning meal or groats, and it had already acquired its bleak literary reputation by the time this book was printed — Dickens saw to that.