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Graham Mush with Dates
1 cup graham flour 3 cups water 1 cup dates 1 teaspoon salt Have the water boiling rapidly; add the salt, and stir in the dry flour, sifting it in quite quickly. A long handled spoon should be used for stirring. Cook at least one hour. Clean the dates, remove the stones, and cut each date into quarters. Add the dates just before the mush is cooked.
A plain boiled whole-wheat porridge from the era before instant cereals. Two things decide whether it works: how you get the flour into the water, and how you handle the long cooking.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole-wheat flour, including the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat flour is the closest substitute; ordinary whole-wheat pastry flour will give a smoother, softer mush.
- Adding the flourSifting it into rapidly boiling water in a thin stream while stirring hard is the whole trick — dumped in, it seizes into lumps that will not break up later. Some cooks slake the flour in a little cold water first, which is more forgiving.
- The hour of cookingAn hour of direct boiling means constant attention and a scorched bottom if you look away. Set the pan over a double boiler or in a very low oven once it has thickened, or use a heavy pot on the lowest heat and stir every few minutes.
- ConsistencyThree parts water to one of flour gives a stiff mush that will set firm as it cools. Thin it with more boiling water during cooking if you want a pourable breakfast porridge.
- Dates"Clean the dates" most likely means rinsing off the dust and stickiness of dried dates sold loose; pitted dessert dates need only quartering. Added at the end they hold their shape — stirred in early they dissolve into sweetness.
- SaltA full teaspoon for one cup of flour is on the high side by current taste. Half a teaspoon suits most palates, especially with dates supplying sweetness.
- Yield and servingAbout four servings. Serve hot with milk or cream, or pour the leftovers into a loaf pan, chill until firm, then slice and fry in butter — the standard second-day treatment for any mush.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat, plain cooking and abstention from meat and stimulants. His followers gave the word to a flour, a cracker and eventually to a whole style of eating, and his influence runs straight through the vegetarian and health-food cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boiled mush of one grain or another was the standard American breakfast long before packaged flakes, with cornmeal the usual base. The dates mark a slightly later moment: imported dried fruit is generally said to have become cheaper and more widely available by the early 1900s, and health writers favored it as a sweetener in place of refined sugar.