“More gruel please,” whispers young Oliver Twist in Charles Dickens’s famous novel about the British work house.
Gruel gets a bad rap as subsistence food fed to prisoners but in fact this thin porridge has been a mainstay for humanity since the Stone Age.
According to Wikipedia, gruel is a food consisting of some type of grain … such as ground oats, wheat, rye or rice … cooked in water or milk. It is a thinner version of porridge. Historically, gruel has been a staple of the Western diet, especially for peasants. Gruel has been associated with feeding the sick or recently-weaned children.
Gruel predates the earliest civilization, emerging in the hunter gatherer societies as a meal of gathered grains soaked in water. Soaking made the food easier to chew and more digestible. Cooking sanitized the mixture. Gruel was also a medium for growing yeast for fermentation, the first step for making both bread and beer.
Rice gruel called congee remains a staple food for millions of people around the world. Sometimes it is made with chicken stock and probably tastes like my favourite chicken soup with rice.
Gruel can be very satisfying and nutritious. Warm rice pudding with thick cream is the food of the gods.
My favourite grain is oats, either steel-cut or rolled oats will do for a wonderful breakfast of porridge sweetened with brown sugar, drowned in milk. Perhaps my love for porridge is partly due to my Scottish grandmother. Since medieval times oats have been grown in Scotland as the staple diet of the crofters. It is hard to imagine Scotland without oats.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, many countries imposed sanctions on Russia. A Youtuber showed the empty grocery shelves in Moscow. Particularly absent was kasha, also known as buckwheat. While oatmeal porridge brings me the comfort of my childhood each morning, kasha is the comforting breakfast food for many Slavic people. Intrigued, I bought a bag of cracked buckwheat at the Co-op grocery store and followed the directions on the package. It told me to toast the groats in a hot pan and then slowly stir them into boiling salted water. Much like cooking rice, the cooking pot is covered tightly and simmered without stirring for 15 minutes. Like Scottish oatmeal porridge, kasha can be eaten simply with butter, salt and pepper or sweetened to taste.
Toasting the buckwheat took only a minute or two and created a rich nutty taste. I can fully understand why Muscovites panicked and cleared the shelves of this staple grain.
Corn has sustained North and South Americans for millennia. Corn comes from a wild grain called teosinte which is still growing in Mexico today. The earliest corn plant was very small but after years of breeding and selection corn has been changed into what we know today. Dry corn can be ground into meal that is cooked into a type of porridge or mush. Soaking cornmeal creates a beverage called atole.
Gruel in its many forms around the world is inexpensive, nourishing and takes like home.
