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CRACKED WHEAT PUDDING
To one quart new or unskimmed milk add one-third cup cracked wheat, same of sugar (or a little more if preferred), a little salt and small piece of stick cinnamon. Place in moderate oven and bake two hours or longer. When about half done stir in the crust already formed, and it will form another sufficiently brown. When done the wheat will be very soft, and the pudding of a creamy consistency. It can be eaten hot or cold, and is nice for invalids. A handful of raisins added is consid ered an improvement by some.
A baked milk-and-grain pudding of the same family as old-fashioned rice pudding, slow-cooked until the wheat softens and the milk thickens on its own. It needs almost no attention beyond one well-timed stir.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no numbers; "moderate oven" is conventionally rendered today as somewhere around 325-350F. For a two-hour bake, the lower end is safer against scorching at the edges; check that the milk is barely trembling, not boiling.
- Cracked wheatThis is coarsely broken wheat berries, sold today as cracked wheat. Whole wheat groats are not the same thing, being uncracked. Bulgur is a poor substitute here: it is pre-steamed and dried, so it will soften much faster and is likely to lose the creamy texture.
- New or unskimmed milkWhole milk is the modern equivalent. Skim or low-fat will still cook the wheat but the pudding will be thin and prone to curdling; a splash of cream in whole milk gets closer to unhomogenized farm milk.
- The stir that mattersStirring the browned skin back in at the halfway mark is the whole method. It disperses the set milk solids through the pudding, which is what makes it creamy rather than watery grain under a lid of skin.
- VesselThe recipe specifies no dish. A baking dish of about two quarts will hold the quart of milk with room to spare. The quart of milk to one-third cup wheat looks alarmingly thin at the start and will be right at the end.
- TimingTwo hours is a minimum, not a maximum. The wheat should be entirely soft with no chalky center; if it still has bite at two hours, keep going and add a little warm milk if the pudding has tightened too far.
- CinnamonA whole stick, fished out before serving. Ground cinnamon will cloud and speckle the pudding rather than perfuming it clear.
- YieldAbout four servings, or several small invalid portions over two days. It keeps three days covered in the refrigerator and thickens as it chills, thin it with milk if serving cold.
Buckeye Cookery is often said to have set aside part of its pages for invalid cookery, and this pudding is a good example of what that meant in an 1870s household: milk, a soft grain, sugar and a single mild spice, cooked long enough that nothing needed chewing. Nineteenth-century sickroom cookery worked from the assumption that an invalid's digestion was weak and that bland, slowly cooked starch in milk was the safest thing to offer, an idea inherited from older gruels, panadas and possets. Cracked wheat itself was a common breakfast grain in American kitchens of the period, promoted by health reformers who preferred whole grains to bolted white flour, and it turns up in these books boiled for porridge as often as baked into puddings. The suggestion that raisins are "considered an improvement by some" is a nice piece of period caution: for a patient, plainness was the point, and fruit was an indulgence to be flagged rather than assumed.