Barley Gruel

Dish: Barley Gruel

Country of Origin: England

Year: 1664

Source:  The Cookery Book of Mary Bent from the John Hodgkin Collection of Cookery Books.

 

Starting this project, I had a daunting choice ahead of me.  Of all the recipes in all time in all the world, where should I start?  After some careful thought, I settled on today’s recipe “To Make Barley Gruel” from a cookbook probably compiled by a woman named Mary Bent in 1664.

 

Why gruel?  From a pragmatic point of view, it seemed an easy place to start.  The simplicity of gruel guaranteed that the ingredients were few, cheap, and available.  More than that, though, I just find gruel funny.  It has a wholly unappetizing name, and is often depicted as slop just barely meeting the minimum requirements to be labeled “food.”  It seems to provide sustenance, but no enjoyment.  Could it really be that bad?  Or was Oliver was actually on to something when he asked for more?

 

I had already purchased my missing ingredients and was excited to start cooking when I met my first snag.  This recipe, unlike all the others in this particular book, had no instructions.  It was just a list of ingredients.  Here it is printed with its original spelling and punctuation:

 

“Take 4 quarts of fresh watter 3 ounces of pearl barley half a pound of Curraines an half a pound of raison one Lemon a quarter of an ounce of Cinniomon alittel mace sweet it with Suger and brick wine to your taste.”

 

Not to be deterred, I developed a theory: no instructions were included because all I needed to do was throw it all in a pot and heat it up.  It's just gruel, right?

 

SUBSTITUTIONS

1)    Nutmeg is a pretty good, and pretty standard substitute for mace, and I already have nutmeg handy.

2)    More disappointing to me was my inability to find currants, which do have a distinct flavor.  I decided to just double up on the raisins.

3)    I have no idea what brick wine is, but I’m sure it isn’t Carlo Rossi, which is what I used.

 

COOKING

It seemed to me the best way to approach this was to cook the barley until it resembled what I imagined gruel to look like, then add the spices and raisins.  Adding the barley to the gruel revealed the ridiculous proportion of actual food to water.  Here was a pot with a gallon of water to about ¾ cup of barley.  I knew the barley would plump up as it cooked, and I hoped that at some point it would just break apart into a porridge/paste consistency.  The only way to find out was to start boiling.

 

Making the barley look like gruel took a lot longer than I thought or hoped.  The barley swelled, but never burst, and there was still A LOT of water in the pot.  After about three hours enough water had evaporated to leave a bubbling sputtering mess of barley suspended in cloudy liquid.  

This was, I decided, as close to gruel as I was ever going to get with this method.  I added the remaining ingredients, gave it a good stir, and waited a few more minutes for the flavors to blend.

 

THE TASTING

Here I had my tiny bowl of gloop and plumped up raisins.  It looked a little like oatmeal and smelled like Christmas – cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins and lemon definitely conjured up thoughts of spiced cider and cinnamon buns.  As for the taste: overwhelmingly raisiney.  I suppose that’s to be expected; there is, after all, a pound of raisins in this damn thing, but the experience of eating the gruel was basically that of eating raisins, with a lemon aftertaste.  The barley itself was not a major player in this performance, at least in terms of taste.  It did provide texture, and a thick substrate in which to suspend the raisins, but for something called "barley gruel" I was expecting more barley flavor.  I tried to get a sense for what it would taste like without the raisins, and took a bite of just barley.  Here the taste of lemon juice took over.  This led me to wonder whether the “one lemon” that the recipe called for actually supposed to be just the lemon zest, or maybe “one smaller lemon” 

 

Overall consensus:  Honestly, it’s not THAT bad.  Certainly not as bad as I was expecting gruel to be (though admittedly, this seems to be a highly spiced and flavored gruel).  It seems to rely on a sort of “tofu philosophy” of tasting like whatever you put in it (in this case raisins, raisins, raisins – have I mentioned it tastes like raisins?).  It’s certainly not something I would want to eat with any kind of regularity.  Which was bad news because…

 

THE AFTERMATH

I also discovered something else that I’m likely to find with a lot of these recipes.  People cooked a lot of food at once.  I sampled my little bowl, and found that I still had TWO QUARTS of the stuff remaining.  I figured I'd just eat some for breakfast and threw it in the refrigerator.  Here I discovered that gruel, when cold, hardens in to a horrifyingly solid gruel brick.

 

Note to self:  adjust recipe based on likely portion size

Final Grade: D+