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Other Ways of Preparing the Cereal
A little ingenuity exercised in connection with the many favorite recipes enclosed in the Five Roses Cook Book will produce quite a variety of tasty desserts. When making the morning meal, should you have any left over, pour the cereal into a deep dish to cool, and then, when required for lunch or tea, slice and fry. Very nice when served with fried bacon.
It can likewise be served as a dessert.
Place in custard cups and serve with sweetened cream.
Note-The Editor would welcome any new recipes dealing with this breakfast cereal not incorporated in the Five Roses Cook Book. Address your envelope: "Culinary Dept., Lake of the Woods Milling Company, Ltd., Montreal, Que."
IT is from the great amount of phosphates and nitrates it contains that the Lake of the Woods Breakfast Food derives its high nutritive value. Phosphates build nerves and brain, nitrates produce muscle. The germ of the wheat, which is so rich in phosphates and other food values, adds a natural wheat flavor to this cereal that is very pleasing. Growing children, convalescents, all who require an easily digested food, full of wholesome, appetizing qualities and concentrated nutriment, cannot help but find in this Breakfast Food the cereal best suited to their requirements.
This is less a recipe than a technique for leftovers: cold cooked wheat porridge, set firm, sliced and fried. It works, but the original assumes you already know what the cereal is and how thick it should be.
- What the cereal isLake of the Woods Breakfast Food was a wheat cereal with the germ left in, as the page itself says. The exact grind is not recorded here; cream of wheat, farina, coarse semolina porridge or steel-cut oats all behave the same way for this purpose.
- It has to be cooked thickThe hinge of the whole thing. Porridge cooked loose enough to eat comfortably from a bowl will not set firm enough to slice. Cook it stiff — a spoon should stand briefly — or the slices collapse in the pan.
- "A deep dish"Use a small loaf tin or straight-sided container so you get an even block to cut. Press the hot cereal down to eliminate air pockets, smooth the top, and cool uncovered before refrigerating.
- Chilling timeOvernight in the refrigerator is best; four hours minimum. The original assumes a cool larder from breakfast until tea, which is roughly the same interval.
- Slicing and fryingCut slices about half an inch thick. Fry in bacon fat or butter over medium heat, 4 to 5 minutes a side, and leave them alone until a crust forms — moving them early is what makes them break up. A light dusting of flour on each cut face helps.
- The dessert versionThe original does not say whether the cereal goes into the cups hot or as chilled slices; spooning it in while hot is the simpler reading. "Sweetened cream" most likely means cream with sugar stirred in rather than whipped.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; a batch made from about a cup of dry cereal will fill a small loaf tin, and the number of slices depends on how thick you cut them.
- The nutrition claimThe closing paragraph is advertising copy. Phosphates do not build brains and nitrates do not produce muscle; this is the vocabulary of pre-vitamin nutritional science, when foods were ranked by their mineral and nitrogen content. Whole wheat cereal is a decent food, but not for these reasons.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose mills at Keewatin, Ontario, supplied the Five Roses flour brand from head offices in Montreal — hence the invitation to post your own recipes to the "Culinary Dept." Manufacturer cookbooks of this kind were sold cheaply or given away, and every page did double duty as instruction and advertisement, which is why a note on frying leftover porridge slides straight into a paragraph about phosphates and nitrates. The dish itself is far older than the brand: slicing and frying cold set grain porridge is the standard thrift technique behind fried cornmeal mush in the United States, Pennsylvania scrapple, and fried polenta in northern Italy. What changes here is only the grain — the wheat middlings and germ that a roller mill produced in quantity, sold back to the household as a breakfast cereal.