So, today’s recipe sounds horrible, barley gruel, but let’s find out. Thanks for joining
us today on 18th Century Cooking with Jas. Townsend and Son.
The recipe for today comes from John Knots 1724 cookbook called “The Cooks and Confectioners
Dictionary” and you know, it starts off with something pretty simple, he wants us
to make barley water with 3 ounces of barley and a quart of water so I’m going to put
this quart of water on to boil and then we’re going to add in our 3 ounces of barley. He
also talks about making sure that our barley is white and if your barley is like my barley,
you’ll start boiling it and you’ll get this kind of scum that comes up to the surface
and you’ll want to skim that and you’ll get maybe sort of a brown barley water out
of it and what he wants is the nice cleaner water so he talks about shifting the water
once or twice so once it’s come up to the boil and some of the scum has come up to the
surface, we’re going to drain this off and put more water back in, again about a quart.
We don’t want to put in too much more, and let this boil. As it’s boiling we can add
in our currants. He asks for about 4 ounces of currants in this situation. You could use
raisins instead, really the currants aren’t the important part of this, so a little less
or a little more really isn’t’ that important.
To get your barley nice and tender, you should boil it about an hour. So our barley is basically
done. It’s ready to go. We need to let this cool and we’re going to start making this
other mixture that we’re going to add into it, so let me set this aside to cool and now
let’s work on our other mixture.
We need 3 egg yolks. He calls for a half a pint, it may actually be 10 ounces, of cream.
Also, some white wine, the same amount, also about a cup. Also some lemon zest, it’s
about a half a lemon peel that I zested up. Now our mixture is stirred up, I’ve got
our gruel, I’m going to go ahead, for the sake of mixing it up, I’m going to put it
into the mixing bowl, but we’re going to need to heat this up, so we’ll put it back
into a vessel we can heat with. You want to make sure that this is cool enough though
that it doesn’t cook our eggs as we add this in, and you can tell by this time that
the barley should have absorbed a lot of that water. It’s not nearly as liquidy as it
was in the beginning. Now that this is mixed up, we can put it back in our vessel here.
We’re going to put it on a low heat and make sure to stir it constantly until it starts to thicken.
I’ve let this cool a little bit. The recipe says to sweeten to taste so I’m just going
to add a little bit of sugar here and mix it in and hopefully it’s cool enough that
I can try it out.
Mmm, whoa, that’s the best gruel I have ever had. This is really good. All the flavors
are there. You get a little bit of the wine flavor up on top. If you want to use just
a sparkling grape juice you can get the same kind of flavors here that the wine’s going
to give you, at least a little bit, if you don’t want to use an alcohol, but you get
all these different flavors coming in that we had with the little bit of spices, that
lemon in there, the sweetness also, the thickness of this custard is wonderful and those little
textures of the barley in there. They’ve been cooked so long that they’re very soft,
just like a tapioca would be and tapioca wasn’t in the 18th century, at least in an English
context, so this is probably as close as you’re ever going to get to a tapioca pudding in
the 18th century. Wonderful. If you get a chance to make up this barley gruel, you will
enjoy it, I promise you. I want to thank you for coming along as we’re experimenting,
as we’re savoring the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.
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