Is it worth the waiting for?
If we live till eighty four
All we ever get is gruel!
Every day we say our prayer
Will they change the bill of fare?
Still we get the same old gruel!
Gru-el. Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Have you ever had it? Do you know what it’s made from? I have to admit to a ‘no’ on both counts. And that’s despite several long and hard years at Dotheboy’s Hall, which included stainless steel spoonfuls of frog-spawn pudding, stale spotted dick and freeze-dried mashed potato: force fed by Irish hags in stained nylon housecoats. Stop any reasonable person in the street and ask them the same question, and I bet you’ll get a blank look and a vague answer: “a watery soup?”... “a porridge made from floor sweepings, perhaps?” ...”Something to do with Dickens?”
Now our old friend, Wikipedia, rather sniffily describes it thus: “from a literary...or bourgeois point of view...(gruel) has often been associated with poverty...Gruel was on the Third Class menu of The Titanic on the eve of her sinking.”
And so it was, and so it has. Essentially, gruel is a generic term for a cereal- oat, wheat, rye flour or rice boiled in water and milk to create a thin porridge or soup; it was the staple diet of the Ancient Greeks. It can also be made from acorns. The photograph on Wikipedia is appalling.
There’s a whole chapter devoted to gruel in Stefan Gates’s brilliantly subversive, Gastronaut (BBC Books, 2005) which I would recommend without hesitation to anybody else with a dark and twisted mind. I love this book; it’s a comforting bedside companion. It includes recipes for marinated criminal (a Confucian concoction from Ancient China) and Nettle Haggis, and instructions on how to catch, cook and eat the kiddywink’s guinea pigs. Strangely, Gates seems to quite like gruel and includes a recipe made from rice simmered in water for an hour, sweetened with sugar, and flavoured with cinnamon, an orange and a splash of brandy.
