gruesome watergruel

This stuff is also known as watergruwel or krentjebrij. The internet is full of all sorts of versions of it.

Fokky explains on the wiki that: Parelgort is barley with outer skin removed (gerst in Dutch) and can be bought at some flour mills in the Netherlands (gotta love the flour mills, superb for home bread bakers!). My wild guess is that it can be substituted with rough oatmeal (havermout), but I'm not entirely sure.

My bastard version is based on Fokky's assumption that parelgort can be substituted with rolled oats. A traditional oatmeal porridge recipe is: 4 cups (1 litre) water, 1 cup (180 grams) steel-cut Irish Oatmeal, 1/4 teaspoon salt. So when using rolled oats I decided to follow that and use a lot less water than the one litre the recipe calls for. So here it goes:


In cast iron pan put 500 ml water, 2 dl rolled oats, 2 dl “rode bessensap”, 4 baby boxes of raisins (all I had in the house), 1 dl raw cane sugar, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (again all I had in the house), 2 big chunks of lemon peel.


Leave it to boil for 10 min, dont forget to stir or it will burn. The leave it standing with the lid on for the night.


The result looking sort of hideous and pink in a not-good way.


Before eating I reheated it and the good news is that it is not nearly as disgusting as it looks.


It is not the best thing ever. It can be eaten with lots of sugar and cinnamon.