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A Breakfast Combination (a Welcome Change from Porridge)
Mix together 1 cup of the cereal, 1 of oatmeal and 1 of barley. Rub in about 2 ounces of good dripping and 2 tablespoons soft brown sugar, a good pinch of salt and 1 heaping teaspoon baking powder.
Mix into a firm dough with milk or water, divide into two parts, roll out, prick it and bake until ready. Cut into thin slices and cook in a cooler part of the oven till thoroughly crisp and toasted throughout.
Pound down with a rolling pin or, better still, put through the mincing machine twice. Put in an air-tight tin or bottle, and serve when wanted with boiling milk.
This is a homemade dry breakfast cereal in the Grape-Nuts manner: a stiff sweetened dough is baked, dried until brittle, then ground. The hinge is the second baking — anything less than bone-dry will go soft and mould in the tin.
- "The cereal"The recipe assumes a cooked or flaked cereal already to hand and does not say which; a rolled wheat or plain wheat farina works in the same proportion. The mix is simply one part each of three grains.
- Barley and oatmeal"oatmeal" of this period is likely rolled or medium-cut oats rather than instant, and "barley" most probably barley flour or fine barley meal; the recipe does not specify. Coarse pot barley would not hydrate in a dough this stiff.
- DrippingTwo ounces is about a quarter cup of rendered beef or bacon fat. Butter, lard or a neutral solid shortening all substitute directly; dripping gives a faintly savoury edge that suited a fat that was free in every kitchen.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none, only "bake until ready" and then "a cooler part of the oven." In a modern oven a moderate heat of around 350F will do for the first bake, until the slabs are firm and dry to the centre; for the second drying use 250 to 275F and judge by the slices rather than the clock, turning them partway.
- Test for drynessA slice should snap rather than bend, and should be crisp right through the middle when broken. Any leathery core will carry moisture into the storage tin and spoil the whole batch.
- Mincing machineA hand-cranked meat grinder on its coarse plate. A food processor pulsed in short bursts gives the same nubbly grain; run it too long and you have flour.
- Storage and servingCool completely before it goes into the tin, or condensation will undo the drying. Boiling milk poured over softens it to the texture the writer intended — this is not meant to be eaten dry and crunchy in the modern way.
- YieldThree cups of dry grain plus fat and sugar should give something in the region of four cups of finished cereal. Well dried and sealed it will keep for some weeks.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, with its head office at Montreal and its mills at Keewatin -- a flour-miller's premium book of the sort widely distributed in Canadian kitchens in the 1910s and 1920s. Baking a stiff dough, drying it hard and grinding it is the same principle behind the granulated breakfast cereals of the later nineteenth century, Grape-Nuts among them. The dripping suggests period thrift: beef fat saved from the roasting pan, used here as the shortening in a breakfast food. The heading's promise of "a welcome change from porridge" is honest about what it was competing with.