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Cereal Left-Overs
THE appetizing dishes which may be evolved from a small left-over of any cereal are many. Even a few spoonfuls of well-cooked cereal can be utilized in gems or griddlecakes, or can be fried in butter and eaten hot with maple sirup. Set it away carefully, covering tightly. An excellent plan is to keep three bakingpowder tins-a quarter, half, and pound size for this purpose. The variety in size will fit the amount of the left-over. Brush the can inside with butter, pack in the cereal while hot, and cover. When needed, slip it out of the can, cut in half-inch slices, and roll in flour to dry. Dip in egg and crumbs and fry in smoking hot fat. Eat with maple sirup. Cream of wheat, mush, hominy, wheatena, Quaker oats, flaked rice, farina, Pettijohn, Ralston's food, wheatlet-indeed, any of the large variety of cooked breakfast foods can be made palatable in this way. If the leftover only amounts to a cupful, combine it with flour as given in oatmeal muffins and you will have a most satisfactory hot breakfast bread. Served with bacon these second-day preparations of cereals form a very nice relish. The uses of cold rice cannot be enumerated. There are so many methods of transforming it into attractive dishes that many housewives while preparing hot rice for the table, cook a double portion and reserve it for various uses. A cupful of rice is a pleasant addition to many hot breakfast breads.
It may be made into delicious puddings, fritters, pancakes; mixed with a cupful of cold tomato or left-over tomato soup, well even seasoned, sprinkled with cheese and buttered bread crumbs and baked till brown, when it appears as a palatable entrée. It can be utilized for croquettes, drop cakes, for a thickening to soup and stews; it may be curried, worked into left-over meat dishes, and even changed into ice cream. Macaroni and spaghetti leftovers make good réchauffés. With the addition of a few spoonfuls of milk and water, cold macaroni cooked in white sauce or spaghetti, which made its first appearance in tomato sauce, may be reheated in the double boiler, a spoonful of each put in a ramequin dish, then covered with grated cheese and baked.
Rice with Cheese Crust. 2 cupfuls boiled rice, 1 cupful milk, 2 eggs, Pepper, Salt, 1 cupful grated cheese, 1 tablespoonful butter.
Put the rice in a double boiler and cook it in the milk till smooth and soft. If there are any lumps in the rice, beat with a wire whisk. Add the well-beaten eggs and the salt and pepper. Pour into a shallow baking pan, sprinkle the cheese lightly over the top, dot with morsels of butter, and bake till the top is delicately brown. This makes a nice entrée.
Rice with Cheese. 3 cupfuls cold rice, 1 tablespoonful butter, Dash cayenne and salt, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1 cupful grated cheese, 1 cupful milk, ½ cupful crumbs. tips of the fingers. Add the yolk of the egg, well beaten, milk, butter, buttered cracker and, last of all, the white of egg, Reheat the rice in a double boiler.
Butter a pudding dish and cover the bottom of it with rice; dot with scraps of butter; sprinkle with grated cheese, cayenne, and salt, and repeat until the rice and the cheese are used up. Add the milk, cover with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake twenty minutes.
Rice Griddlecakes. cupful cold rice, 2 cupfuls flour, beaten stiff. Cook on hot waffle irons.
This is a left-overs chapter with three short formulas tucked into it, and the text has come through with some scrambling — the ingredient list for "Rice with Cheese" has stray lines from a neighbouring page, and "Rice Griddlecakes" is missing most of its method. The useful part is the technique: cooked cereal chilled in a mould, sliced, breaded and fried.
- The hinge: chill it solidThe fried-cereal trick only works if the packed cereal sets firm all the way through, which takes several hours cold, not minutes. Sliced warm or soft, it slumps in the breading and bursts in the fat.
- Baking-powder tinsQuarter, half and pound tins were sized by the weight of powder they held, not by volume, and capacities varied by brand. Any straight-sided tin or a small loaf pan lined with plastic wrap does the same job; the point is a diameter that yields a neat round slice.
- Store it cold, not "set away"Cooked grain held at room temperature is a good medium for Bacillus cereus, which survives cooking as spores. Refrigerate the packed tin as soon as it stops steaming and use within three or four days.
- Smoking hot fatRead this as 375F for shallow or deep frying. "Smoking" in a period kitchen meant lard or drippings, whose smoke point is lower than modern refined oils; taken literally with today's oil you are well past frying temperature.
- The cereal namesWheatena, Pettijohn, Ralston's Food and wheatlet were branded cracked-wheat and wheat-germ porridges; farina and Cream of Wheat are the surviving equivalents. "Mush" is cornmeal porridge, "hominy" may mean whole hominy or grits, and flaked rice is a rolled rice cereal — coarse cooked grits or polenta stand in for any of them.
- Gems and ramequinsGems are muffins baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan; a standard muffin tin is fine. A ramequin (ramekin) here is the individual gratin dish. A réchauffé is simply a reheated dish.
- Oven for the baked rice dishesNeither gives a temperature. Bake both at 375F: the cheese-crust version until set and lightly browned, 25 to 30 minutes, and the layered one for the twenty minutes stated. Both serve four as a light main course.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" in an American book of this period usually indicates a firm store cheese of the cheddar type. A dry, aged sharp Cheddar melts and browns better than the softer mild ones sold now.
- The griddlecake formula is incompleteA cup of rice and two cups of flour with no liquid, egg or leavening is not a batter, and the text is garbled: a recipe titled griddlecakes ends with an instruction to cook on waffle irons. Use a working griddlecake recipe and fold in a cup of cold rice.
Left-over chapters like this one are the clearest sign of what a coal or wood range meant to a household: the fire was lit anyway, so porridge was cooked in quantity and its second life planned in advance. Frying sliced cold mush in fat and eating it with maple syrup is much older than these branded cereals — it was standard American farm breakfast practice with cornmeal, and the method simply transferred to Cream of Wheat, Wheatena and the rest as the packaged breakfast-food industry expanded through the 1890s and 1900s. The list of brand names is a useful snapshot: Pettijohn, Ralston's Food and wheatlet were household words when this was written and are now gone, while farina and hominy grits, which came from no company at all, are still on the shelf. The instruction to keep three graduated baking-powder tins for the purpose also says something about a kitchen with no standard storage containers, where every empty tin had a second job.