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Cereal with Fruit
3/4 cup fine wheat breakfast food 3/4 cup cold water 2 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 lb. dates, stoned, and cut in pieces Mix cereal, salt, and cold water; add boiling water to cereal placed on front of range. Boil five minutes, steam in double boiler thirty minutes; stir in dates, and serve with cream. To serve for breakfast, or as a simple dessert.
A plain farina porridge enriched with dates, from the era when cereals were cooked long and slowly over a coal range. The method still works on a gas or electric hob with almost no change.
- "Fine wheat breakfast food"Most likely farina: finely milled wheat, sold today as Cream of Wheat or as fine semolina. Do not substitute cracked or bulgur wheat, which will not thicken in the same way. Instant or quick versions will turn to paste over 35 minutes; use the regular grind.
- Why the cold water firstSlurrying the grain in cold water before it meets the boiling water is the point of the first step: it keeps the particles separate so they hydrate evenly instead of setting into lumps. Note that the recipe adds the boiling water to the slurried cereal; if that lumps for you, pour the slurry into the boiling water in a thin stream while stirring instead.
- "Front of the range"On a coal stove the front was the hotter zone. Read it as direct medium heat: bring to a boil, stir constantly for the five minutes, then move to the double boiler.
- The double boilerThirty minutes over simmering water is not fussiness — it finishes the starch without scorching, and unattended farina on direct heat will catch. A heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water does the same job. If you keep it on direct low heat instead, stir often and expect closer to 10-15 minutes.
- SaltA full teaspoon to three-quarters of a cup of dry cereal will read as assertively salty to some palates, particularly if the dish is served as dessert. If you prefer, start with half and correct at the end.
- DatesHalf a pound is a generous 1 1/2 cups chopped, and most dates sold now are already pitted. Stirring them in at the end keeps them in distinct pieces; add them earlier and they dissolve into the porridge. Medjool go soft and jammy, Deglet Noor hold their shape.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as breakfast, or six small dessert portions. Cream is the period accompaniment; the dates supply all the sweetening the dish needs, so taste before adding sugar.
American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s devoted whole chapters to "cereals," a category that had barely existed a generation earlier. Roller milling made fine wheat products cheap and uniform, packaged breakfast foods arrived under brand names, and domestic-science teachers seized on them as cheap, digestible and easy to cost out for a family budget. The insistence on long, gentle cooking in a double boiler was an article of faith in that movement: undercooked starch was widely believed to be the cause of indigestion, so recipes routinely called for half an hour or more of steaming after the grain had already thickened. Dates arrived in the same decades as an increasingly ordinary import, pressed into blocks or boxed, and they gave a cook a way to sweeten a dish without sugar and to turn a breakfast porridge into something that could reasonably be sent to the table as pudding.