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White Flour Gruel
To a quart of boiling water, slightly salted, add half a cupful of white flour wet with a quarter of a cupful of cold water, and cook slowly in a saucepan for an hour.
A plain flour gruel of the sick-room and nursery type. The whole success of it lies in the slurry and the long, slow cooking.
- Make a proper slurryThe quarter cup of cold water exists solely to disperse the flour before it meets heat. Whisk it to a smooth cream with no dry pockets, then pour it into the boiling water in a thin stream while stirring, or you will get lumps that an hour of cooking will not undo.
- Why an hourThis is not thickening time — the gruel thickens in two minutes. The long simmer cooks out the raw, pasty taste of uncooked starch and breaks the flour down into something easy to digest, which was the point of gruel. Twenty minutes gives you wallpaper paste; the full hour gives you something bland but clean-tasting.
- Keep it barely moving"Cook slowly" means the lowest heat that keeps a bubble or two rising. Flour paste scorches on the bottom of a pan readily and the burnt taste carries through the whole batch. Stir down to the bottom every few minutes, and use a heavy pan.
- Expect it to reduceA quart of water simmered uncovered for an hour will lose a good deal of volume and the gruel will stiffen as it goes. Cover partly, and thin with boiling water at the end to whatever consistency you want — it should pour, not mound.
- White flourOrdinary all-purpose flour. "White flour" was worth specifying at the time because the alternatives for gruel included graham, whole wheat, rye and oatmeal, each of which made a distinctly different gruel.
- Salt and seasoningThe recipe gives no amount: "slightly salted" means a light hand, no more. Cooked for the breakfast table, treat it as a blank base and finish it in the bowl with milk or cream, sugar, a scrape of nutmeg, or salt and butter.
- YieldRoughly three cups, depending on how much reduces away; two to three servings as a breakfast cereal, more if served in small sick-room portions.
Gruel sat at the thin end of a family of cooked cereals that ran from stiff porridge down through mush to something barely thicker than water, and its place in a chapter of breakfast dishes reflects how much of turn-of-the-century home cooking overlapped with home nursing. Cookbooks of this period routinely carried sections on "cookery for the sick," where flour, barley, arrowroot, oatmeal and rice gruels were the standard first foods offered to convalescents, infants being weaned, and anyone whose stomach was thought unequal to solid food. The long slow boiling was understood to make the starch more digestible, and the whiteness and blandness were features rather than faults, as in the workhouse gruel of Oliver Twist, and its thicker cousins such as cornmeal mush.