Gruel, Cruel and Comforting I remember eating cream of wheat, a soothing and warming balm for whatever ails you. How comforting to eat on a cold, bone-chilling day. I still reach for it when I get that feeling of impending flu or worse. A form of gruel, it is much thicker.

The dictionary defines gruel as a thin cereal made by boiling meal, usually oatmeal, in milk and/or water. It comes in endless varieties. Oats, barley, maize, rice, pine nuts, and other grains have been used along with infinite varieties of milk and flavored water.

In the time of Charles Dickens, the British writer, the word gruel became synonymous with cruelty. Who could forget poor Oliver Twist, his face twisted with hunger, as he asked for "more" and received a glancing blow for his trouble. Orphanages used it for every meal, with the addition of an occasional roll or onion, as an economy measure but it proved to be little sustenance for a growing child. It kept them alive but just barely.

Another obviously delightful treat is slippery elm gruel, an herbal digestive aid promoted by a Dr. Richard Schulze. You cook it to a thin porridge with water and flavor with maple syrup, cinnamon, or honey. Instead of cream of wheat, you cook cream of elm. Yummy! Like the gruel of old, you can eat it as a survival food. If you find holes in your body, you fill them with elm gruel. It also works on internal holes, incredibly exciting for the holey caught out in the wilds.

I do not know if they eat it in Gruel, South Carolina, a fictional town described in a book of 19 stories by George Singleton. With universal themes of money and revenge combined with pathos and humor, it tells of demented citizens trying to make sense of a strange world in which they live.

The cruelest gruel of all, that could bite any of us, is a worm that wreaks frightful havoc on computers. It presents as a fix for a virus in an innocent looking email. Once the victim clicks on the fix, things explode in the hard drive, hiding it and changing passwords as if they weren't already difficult enough to remember.

Yes, gruel like everything else wears many faces, not all of them kindly. It appears warm and soothing, cold and cruel, and a patch for holey people with rumbly stomachs. We need gruel!

Learn more about this author, JoAnne Windsinger.
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