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Wheatlet Mush with Fruit
6 tablespoons Wheatlet 2 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup dates, stoned and cut in quarters Add the Wheatlet and salt to the boiling water and cook two hours. Add dates or figs, cook two minutes more.
A plain double-boiler breakfast cereal from the era when wheat granules were cooked for hours rather than minutes. The substitutions are simple; the cooking time is the thing to reconsider.
- What Wheatlet wasA branded granulated wheat cereal, the same idea as today's farina. Cream of Wheat, farina, or any plain wheat semolina cereal stands in at the same 6 tablespoons to 2 cups water ratio.
- The two hoursLong cooking suited the coarser grain of the period; the recipe itself specifies neither direct heat nor a double boiler. Modern farina is pre-cut fine enough to thicken in two to five minutes; two hours will give you paste. Cook to package time, or 20-30 minutes for a coarse steel-cut style grain.
- Use a double boilerIf you do extend the cooking, set the pan over simmering water. Direct heat on a thin modern pan will catch and scorch long before the time is up, and the scorch flavor carries through the whole bowl.
- Adding the grainRain the cereal into the boiling salted water in a thin stream while whisking. Dumped in at once it lumps, and no amount of later stirring fully breaks the lumps up.
- The fruitDates or figs go in at the very end so they warm and soften without dissolving. A third of a cup of quartered dates is roughly 2 ounces. Dried figs want stems removed and slicing to the same size.
- ConsistencyThis sets firm as it cools; cold mush was sometimes sliced and fried, though this recipe says nothing of it. If you want it loose in the bowl, hold back a little water and thin at the end with milk.
- YieldTwo generous servings, or three small. Serve with milk or cream; the recipe calls for no sugar, and the dates carry the sweetness.
Wheatlet was one of many branded breakfast cereals that flooded American grocers between the 1890s and the First World War, when milling companies discovered that a paper carton and a name sold better than bulk grain from a barrel. Its appearance by name in a cookbook is ordinary for the period; recipes did not use generic descriptions, assuming the reader knew the box. Vegetarian and reform-diet cooking of the era leaned heavily on cereals, which were cheap, filling, and carried the endorsement of the sanitarium movement that gave us Kellogg and Post. The dates are the interesting addition. Dried fruit was a common way to sweeten a breakfast grain without sugar, a habit that ran alongside what is often said to have been the period's wariness of refined sugar and its enthusiasm for what was then called whole or natural food.