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Cracked Wheat
3/4 cup cracked wheat 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 cups water Soak the cracked wheat in two cups of water for two hours. Heat remaining water to boiling point, add salt and the cracked wheat with the water in which it has been soaking. Boil for ten minutes; place in cooker over night.
The flavor will be greatly improved if the wheat is slightly browned in the oven before soaking.
A fireless-cooker breakfast cereal: brought to the boil on the stove, then left in an insulated box to finish on residual heat while the household sleeps. The method transfers cleanly to modern equipment, with one caveat about the overnight hold.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box — cork, felt, hay or sawdust packed around a nested pail — that held a boiling pot near its temperature for hours with no fuel. A wide-mouth vacuum flask, a heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler, or a slow cooker on low all stand in for it.
- Cracked wheat is not bulgurCracked wheat is raw wheat berries broken between rollers; bulgur is parboiled, dried, then cracked, and cooks in a fraction of the time. Buy grain labelled cracked wheat; if you use bulgur instead, cut the cooking drastically.
- The overnight holdCooked grain held for eight hours at gradually falling warm temperatures is the classic setting for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling and germinate between roughly 40F and 130F. If the vessel will not stay above 140F all night, cook it through in the evening and refrigerate it, or start it in the morning.
- Toast the wheat firstThe recipe offers browning as optional but says it greatly improves the flavor. A moderate oven (around 350F) works: spread the dry grain on a sheet pan and stir every few minutes until it smells nutty and turns a shade darker, then cool before soaking.
- Don't discard the soaking waterThe recipe is explicit: the two cups of soaking water go into the pot. It carries dissolved starch and is counted in the total liquid, so pouring it off leaves the cereal short by two-thirds of its water.
- Liquid ratio and finishingFour parts water to one part grain by volume is generous, which is what the long slack cooking requires. If the morning porridge is looser than you like, a few minutes uncovered over heat will tighten it.
- Yield and servingThree-quarters of a cup of dry grain gives roughly three cups cooked — two to three breakfast servings. Period practice was cream and sugar, or molasses; it takes equally well to butter and salt as a savory grain.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement in American and British households between about 1900 and the First World War, promoted in pamphlets, extension bulletins and cookbooks as a way to save coal, gas and a cook's attention. The principle is simply retained heat: bring the pot to a rolling boil, seal it into a well-insulated chamber, and let it coast down slowly through the hours needed to soften tough material. Whole and cracked grains, dried beans, pot roasts and stewed fruit were its natural subjects, and breakfast cereals were its showpiece, since the cook could set the pot at bedtime and lift out a finished dish before the stove was even lit. Cracked wheat itself was one of the ordinary breakfast grains of the period, sold alongside oatmeal, hominy and cornmeal in bulk from the grocer's barrel, well before boxed cereals displaced them.