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Wheat Au Gratin
1/2 pint (I cup) wheat 1 pint (2 cups) milk 4 heaping tablespoonfuls grated cheese 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter Salt and pepper to taste Pick over the wheat and wash it well; then soak it overnight in cold water to cover. In the morning put it in a casserole and cook it till tender, salting it during the last ten minutes of cooking. Drain it well. Blend the butter and flour together in a saucepan over the fire, add the milk gradually, and season nicely with salt and pepper; stir till it boils for four minutes.
Put a layer of the sauce into a buttered fireproof Cooking in Caserole Dishes dish, then put in half of the wheat, another layer of sauce, half of the cheese, the remaining wheat, sauce, and finally the cheese on the top.
Bake for ten minutes in a hot oven.
A simple gratin of whole wheat berries in béchamel. The only real work is the grain, which needs an overnight soak and a long, unhurried simmer before it ever meets the sauce.
- What "wheat" means hereWhole wheat berries — the entire kernel, sold today as wheat berries or grano. Not cracked wheat, bulgur or wheatmeal. One cup dry yields roughly three cups cooked.
- Cooking the grainAfter the overnight soak, simmer in fresh water for 45 to 90 minutes depending on the age and variety of the wheat; it should be tender but still chewy. The recipe holds the salt until the last ten minutes, the usual period practice, on the belief that early salting keeps the grain from softening.
- "Casserole" in this bookIn this recipe the casserole is the pot in which the wheat is boiled; the assembling and browning then happen in a separate buttered fireproof dish.
- MeasuresIf the pint here is the imperial 20-ounce pint, the parenthetical cup equivalents run slightly small. Two cups of milk to 2 oz each of butter and flour gives a properly thick sauce; the two heaping tablespoons and the 2 ounces are given as the same quantity.
- Oven heatA hot oven is 425–450°F. Ten minutes at that heat only melts the cheese and colours the top — everything in the dish is already cooked. A few minutes under the broiler does the same job.
- The sauceCook the butter and flour together a minute or two before adding milk, and add the milk gradually off the heat to avoid lumps. Boiling for four minutes, as written, is what cooks out the raw flour taste; do not shorten it.
- CheeseA firm dry cheese grates and browns best — aged Cheddar, Gruyère or Parmesan. Reserve a little extra for the top layer, which is the only part that will actually gratinate.
- YieldServes four as a supper dish or side. It sets firm as it cools and reheats well, though the crust will need renewing under the broiler.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in Britain and America in the years around 1900, and small books like this one appeared alongside the new fireproof earthenware. Whole wheat berries were a familiar cheap food long before that; boiled wheat is the basis of frumenty, the medieval English pottage of grain simmered in milk that survived in country districts into the nineteenth century. What is new here is the treatment: the grain is dressed in a French béchamel and browned with cheese, the au gratin method much used by turn-of-the-century cookery writers. The result sits between a peasant grain dish and a restaurant one.