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Cracked Wheat (Two quarts salted water to two)
Two quarts salted water to two cups best white winter wheat; boil two or three hours in a custard-kettle: Or, soak over night and boil at least three-fourths of an hour: Or, put boiling water in a pan or small tin bucket, set on stove, stir in wheat, set in steamer and steam four hours: Or, make a strong sack of thick muslin or drilling, moisten wheat with cold water, add a little salt, place in sack, leaving half the space for wheat to swell in. Fit a round sheet of tin, perforated with holes half an inch in diameter, to the inside of ordinary kettle, so that it will rest two or three inches from the bottom; lay sack on the tin, put in water enough to reach tin, and boil from three to four hours, supplying water as it evaporates. Serve with butter and syrup, or cream and sugar. When cold, slice and fry; or warm with a little milk and salt in a pan greased with a little butter; or make in griddle-cakes with a batter of eggs, milk, and a little flour, and pinch of salt.
A breakfast cereal given in four interchangeable methods, all of them aimed at long unattended cooking on a wood range. The water-to-grain ratio is the part worth keeping; the four-hour timings are not.
- Custard-kettleThis is a double boiler — an inner pan set over simmering water in an outer one. It exists here only to prevent scorching over direct wood heat. A heavy saucepan on low, stirred occasionally, does the same work in far less time.
- The ratioTwo quarts water to two cups wheat is 4:1 by volume, which sits at the loose end of the usual range for a spoonable cereal; if you want it thicker, drop toward 3 parts water to 1 of cracked wheat. Salt the water at about a teaspoon per quart.
- Best white winter wheatSoft white winter wheat, cracked coarse. Any coarse cracked wheat works; note that bulgur is not the same thing — it has been parboiled and dried, and will cook in 15 to 20 minutes and turn to mush if given an hour.
- TimingsTwo or three hours is a wood-stove figure. Unsoaked coarse cracked wheat needs roughly 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer, covered; soaked overnight, 15 to 20. Cook until the grain is tender with no chalky center, then let it stand off the heat 10 minutes to absorb the last of the water.
- The muslin sack and perforated tinAn improvised steamer: the tin disc holds the bag clear of the boiling water. A modern steamer insert or a folding basket over an inch of water does the job, but there is no advantage to steaming cracked wheat for four hours — this method survived because it needed no watching.
- Room to swellHalf the sack left empty is the one genuinely necessary instruction in that method. Cracked wheat roughly triples in volume; a tightly filled bag or a pan filled past halfway will overflow.
- Frying the cold mushPour the leftover cereal into a greased loaf pan and chill until firm — several hours or overnight. Slice half an inch thick and fry in butter until crusted. Slices cut from insufficiently set mush will fall apart in the pan.
- Griddle-cakesNo proportions are given. Start with 2 cups cold cooked wheat, 2 eggs, about a cup of milk, half a cup of flour and a half teaspoon salt; the batter should drop thickly from the spoon. A teaspoon of baking powder lightens them considerably.
- YieldTwo cups of dry wheat makes roughly six to eight breakfast servings, so leftovers were likely; the recipe supplies three ways of using them.
Cracked wheat belongs to the same nineteenth-century American breakfast table as oatmeal, hominy and cornmeal mush: a whole grain boiled soft, eaten with butter and syrup or cream and sugar, and then reappearing fried in slices the next morning. Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions) specifies a wheat type at a period when grain was commonly sold from bulk grocery stock rather than in branded packages, so the cook was often left to judge it herself. The four alternative methods say a good deal about the kitchens involved — a double boiler, a bucket in a steamer, or a muslin pudding bag suspended over water on a punched sheet of tin, whichever the house happened to own. Long boiling of whole grains was also a matter of fuel economy: a pot could sit at the back of the range all evening or all morning at no extra cost. The pudding-bag technique itself is much older, generally traced to English boiled puddings, and here it has simply been reassigned to porridge.