Farina
1 quart water 1/2 cup farina 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk Heat the water to boiling in the upper part of a double boiler; add the salt; moisten the farina with the milk, taking care to stir it constantly until thick. Boil five minutes, then set in the outer boiler, and cook one hour or more. The flavor may be increased by using one-half milk.
A plain breakfast porridge whose proportions and cooking time both belong to an era of coarser, slower-cooking wheat. Read the ratio and the timing before you start.
- What farina isFarina is finely milled wheat endosperm, sold today as Cream of Wheat or as "farina, hot cereal." It is close kin to semolina, though semolina is usually durum and coarser. It is not flour, not couscous, and not the instant sachets, which are pre-cooked and behave very differently.
- The hinge: moisten before it meets the waterThe one instruction that matters is wetting the farina with the cold milk to a slurry first, then stirring it constantly into the boiling water. Dry farina dumped into hot liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of later cooking will smooth out.
- The hour is for old farina, not yoursModern farina is milled fine, and the quick-cooking grades are pre-steamed; regular farina is done in a few minutes of simmering with stirring, or around ten minutes in a double boiler if you like it very smooth. An hour will not ruin it, but it earns you little.
- Proportions run thinA quart of water plus a cup of milk to half a cup of farina is roughly 10 parts liquid to 1 — a thin, spoonable gruel by current taste. For a porridge that holds its shape on the spoon, modern packages generally call for something in the region of 4 to 5 parts liquid to 1 of farina.
- Double boilerThe point of the upper pan is that farina scorches and sticks readily over direct heat. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat with steady stirring does the same job; a heatproof bowl over simmering water substitutes for the insert.
- SaltA teaspoon in five cups of liquid is about right and should not be cut — unsalted farina tastes flat and chalky.
- "One-half milk"The closing note means replacing half the total liquid with milk rather than adding more: about 2 1/2 cups water to 2 1/2 cups milk. Milk raises the scorching risk, so keep the heat gentle.
- Yield and servingThis makes roughly four breakfast servings. Serve hot with cream and sugar, maple syrup, or stewed dried fruit; poured into a wetted mould, chilled and sliced, leftovers can be fried in butter.
Farina takes its name straight from the Latin for flour or meal, and in American kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it meant the fine, creamy-white inner part of the wheat berry — the same material that roller milling made abundant and cheap once steel rollers replaced millstones, and that reached the breakfast table nationally as branded hot cereal in the 1890s. Its place in a book called Meatless Cookery is straightforwardly economic: cereals were the cheapest calories a household could buy, and cookbooks of this stripe leaned on porridges and milk to carry a breakfast that would once have included bacon or chops. The long double-boiler cooking reflects both the grain of the period and the kitchen of the period.