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Rice Gruel
To one quart of boiling water, salted to taste, add a quarter of a cupful of prepared rice, and cook slowly in a saucepan an hour and a half. Gruels may be served with or without cream or milk.
A sickroom and invalid dish more than a breakfast one, and the proportions reflect that: this is thin by design. A few notes before you start.
- "Prepared rice"In books of this period the phrase usually means ground or flaked rice sold ready for cooking, not whole grains. If you use whole white rice at this ratio you will get a very loose porridge rather than a gruel; ground rice or rice flour gives the smooth, drinkable consistency intended.
- ProportionsA quarter cup of rice to a quart of water is roughly 1:16, far thinner than any ratio used for boiled rice. That is deliberate. Gruel was meant to be sipped or spooned like a thin soup, not eaten as cereal.
- Cooking timeNinety minutes is more than modern rice needs, but it is not an error here: the long slow cook breaks the starch down completely so the liquid thickens and the grain disappears. Use the lowest heat and a heavy pan, and stir occasionally or the starch will catch on the bottom.
- A double boilerThe recipe says only "a saucepan," but setting the pan over water instead of direct heat is an easy way to avoid scorching over so long a cooking, and it needs less attention.
- Salt"Salted to taste" applied to a quart of water works out at roughly half a teaspoon. The recipe has you salt the water at the start.
- YieldSomewhat less than the quart you start with, depending on how much evaporates over the hour and a half. Enough for several small sickroom servings.
- ServingCream or milk stirred in at the end softens the starchiness considerably. Nutmeg, a spoonful of sugar, or a little butter were all common period additions and none of them are out of place.
Gruel occupied a specific niche in nineteenth-century households: it was food for the sick, the very young, the very old and the convalescent, at a time when medical advice leaned heavily on bland, easily digested liquids. Rice, barley, oatmeal and cornmeal gruels all appear across the cookbooks of the period, and instructions for making them turn up in nursing manuals as well as in kitchen books. The word itself descends from an Old French term for meal or coarsely ground grain.