Home › Beverages › Cereal Coffee
Cereal Coffee
8 tablespoons cereal coffee 1/4 saltspoon butter 1 quart cold water Put the cereal into coffee pot with the cold water and butter; boil twenty minutes. Serve with sugar and hot milk or cream. It may be cooked without butter in a percolator.
A quart of grain-based coffee substitute, boiled rather than infused. The method is sound for roasted cereal, which needs real extraction time, but two of the measurements will stop a modern cook.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so a quarter saltspoon is about 1/16 teaspoon — a speck of butter. It was most likely there to keep the foam down and stop the pot boiling over rather than to flavour anything, though the recipe does not say so.
- What cereal coffee isA roasted grain beverage: wheat, bran and molasses, sometimes with chicory or barley, ground coarse. Postum was the household name in this period. Modern equivalents sold as roasted grain or barley beverages behave the same way; instant powders do not and should be mixed to their own directions.
- The twenty minutes is not a misprintRoasted grain has no caffeine, and a brief steeping will not pull much colour or body from coarsely ground grain. The recipe wants a full twenty minutes at a boil to draw out the colour and the malty body.
- StrengthEight tablespoons to a quart is half a cup of grain per four cups of water — about the same as a conventional coffee measure. Reduce it if the result is too thick and cerealy for your taste.
- StrainingThe original assumes a coffee pot that separates grounds from liquid. Boiled in a plain saucepan, the grain turns to sludge; pour through a fine sieve or a paper filter before serving.
- The percolator noteThe recipe allows the butter to be left out when a percolator is used, presumably because the liquid recirculates instead of foaming up in an open pot. A percolator cycle is shorter than the twenty minutes of boiling specified here, so expect a lighter brew.
- Yield and servingOne quart, four modest cups. Served the way coffee was at the time: sugar to taste and hot milk or cream, not cold milk, which would drop the temperature of an already mild drink.
Grain coffees are older than the health-food movement that made them famous — roasted barley, rye and chicory stood in for coffee whenever war or blockade cut off supply, notably across Europe during the Napoleonic years. The American version this recipe assumes belongs to the Battle Creek orbit of the 1890s, where roasted wheat-and-molasses beverages were sold as a caffeine-free substitute and marketed hard against coffee on health grounds; Postum is the brand generally credited with putting it in ordinary kitchens. Its appearance in a meatless cookbook is not accidental: books of this kind, published around the First World War, gathered together the reform table and the economy table at once, and a beverage that used no imported bean suited both arguments equally well.