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Oatmeal Gruel (One teaspoonful oatmeal wet)
One teaspoonful oatmeal wet in cold water. Pour into one quart of boiling water, boil gently one-half hour, add salt and a pinch of sugar.
This is a sick-room drink rather than a bowl of porridge, and the proportions are not a misprint: a single teaspoon of meal to a quart of water yields something barely thicker than water.
- Read the ratio literallyOne teaspoon of oatmeal to 32 oz of water is roughly a 1:190 ratio by volume (a quart is about 192 teaspoons). The result is a cloudy, faintly starchy liquid meant to be drunk from a cup, not eaten with a spoon. If you want porridge, this is not the page for it.
- What "oatmeal" meantIn this period oatmeal often meant coarse or medium ground meal (pinhead or steel-cut) rather than the rolled flakes that dominate now, though flakes were already on sale. Flakes will work but give a slightly slicker, less clean-tasting gruel.
- Wetting the meal firstSlaking the meal in a spoonful of cold water before it hits the boiling pot keeps it from clumping the instant it meets heat. It is the same principle as slaking cornstarch, and at this dilution it is the difference between a smooth liquid and a few sad lumps.
- Half an hour of gentle boilingKeep it at a bare simmer with the lid ajar. At a full boil a quart will lose a good deal of volume in thirty minutes, and since the whole point is a thin, drinkable liquid, top the pan back up with hot water if it reduces much below the starting level.
- Strain before servingPeriod invalid-cookery instructions often pass gruel through a fine sieve or muslin so nothing gritty reaches the invalid. This recipe does not mention it; do it if the gruel is going to someone with a sore throat or a poor appetite.
- Seasoning"Salt and a pinch of sugar" is unquantified; a scant quarter teaspoon of salt for the quart is a reasonable reading. Under-salted gruel tastes flat, and the salt is doing nearly all the work of making it palatable.
- YieldAbout three to four cups, or two to three servings as a warm drink. It thickens slightly as it cools and separates on standing, so stir before pouring and make it the day it is wanted.
Gruel belongs to the sick-room, not the breakfast table, whatever section it is filed under. Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, thin oat, barley or arrowroot gruels were the standard first food given to fever patients, new mothers and the convalescent, on the reasoning that a weakened stomach could manage liquid starch when it could manage nothing else. Cookbooks of this period habitually carry a small cluster of such recipes -- beef tea, barley water, toast water, oatmeal gruel -- because the household cook, not a nurse or a hospital, was expected to produce them. The extreme dilution here reflects that purpose exactly: the aim is warmth, salt and a trace of nourishment in a form that requires almost nothing of the patient. Its reputation as thin, cheerless stuff was already fixed in the popular mind by Dickens's day, which is rather the point of the joke in Oliver Twist.