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Cracked Wheat
5 cups boiling water 1½ teaspoons salt Mix ingredients and cook in double boiler from three to five hours.
A breakfast cereal rather than a side dish, despite its placement among the vegetables. The ingredient list as printed omits the wheat itself, so the proportions have to be reconstructed.
- The missing ingredientThe original gives only water and salt; the quantity of cracked wheat has dropped out of the line. A ratio of about 1 cup of cracked wheat to the 5 cups of water is a plausible reconstruction for this style of book, and gives a soft, fully swollen porridge.
- Double boiler, not direct heatThe point of the double boiler is that the grain cannot catch or scorch over hours of unattended cooking. Keep the lower pan at a bare simmer and top up the water as it evaporates, or the upper pan will run dry.
- Three to five hours is not requiredThat range probably reflects a coal range with a permanently warm surface and a coarser, less uniformly cracked grain. Modern bulgur or fine cracked wheat is done in 15 to 30 minutes in a covered saucepan; coarsely cracked wheat needs 45 to 60 minutes. Long cooking only makes it smoother, not safer or better.
- Cracked wheat vs. bulgurCracked wheat is raw wheat berries broken between rollers. Bulgur, which looks similar in the bin, has been parboiled and dried, and cooks in a fraction of the time with less water. They are not interchangeable at these proportions.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half for five cups of water is well seasoned by modern habit but correct for a savoury-leaning porridge. Reduce it if the cereal is going to be served with sugar and cream.
- Overnight methodA three-to-five-hour cook plausibly aimed at having cereal ready at breakfast. A slow cooker on low overnight approximates it, and so does soaking the grain in the measured water for several hours before a shorter morning simmer.
- Yield and servingAbout 5 cups cooked, serving four to six. Serve hot with milk or cream and sugar or maple syrup; leftovers set firm in a loaf pan and can be sliced and fried in butter, as was done with leftover cornmeal mush.
Cracked wheat was one of the standard hot cereals of American breakfast tables from the mid-nineteenth century onward, alongside oatmeal, hominy and cornmeal mush, and its promotion owed a good deal to the health-reform movement's enthusiasm for whole grains. Its appearance under "Vegetables" in a book of this vintage may be less odd than it looks: cereals, macaroni, rice and hominy seem at times to have been grouped with vegetable cookery as the starchy, non-meat part of a meal rather than treated as a category of their own, though a single book can only suggest as much. The very long double-boiler time is a fingerprint of the coal or wood range, where a pot could be parked at the back of the stove and left alone; grains were also sold far more coarsely cracked than the uniform bulgur and cracked wheat on shelves today. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, issued this book to put its cocoa in domestic kitchens, and alongside the branded recipes it carries a full run of plain household staples such as this one.