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Cream of Wheat
3 cups water 1/2 cup cream of wheat 1/2 teaspoon salt Cook the same as Rolled Wheat.
A two-line entry that only makes sense alongside its neighbours in the fireless-cookery chapter: the method is borrowed wholesale from the rolled wheat recipe on the facing page.
- What a fireless cooker wasA wooden or metal box lined with insulation, into which you dropped a soapstone or cast-iron disc heated on the range. Food was brought to a boil on the stove, sealed in, and left to coast down over several hours. The modern thermal cooker and the wrapped-blanket method work on the same principle.
- The missing liquidNo water is given, presumably because the rolled wheat recipe supplied it. A usual ratio for farina is around four to five parts water to one part cereal, which at 1/2 cup Cream of Wheat is about 2 to 2 1/2 cups water.
- Boil first, alwaysThis is the hinge of all fireless cookery. The cereal and salted water must reach a full rolling boil on direct heat before the pot goes into the insulated chamber; the box only retains heat, it never adds any. A lukewarm start means cold, gluey grain in the morning.
- TimingAn overnight hold, on the order of six to eight hours, was the point of the exercise; the same cereal thickens in two to three minutes of stirring on a modern burner. The long hold is for convenience, not texture.
- Modern equivalentsA wide-mouth vacuum flask works well: pour in the boiling cereal, seal, and leave it. A slow cooker on low, or a heavy pot boiled hard then wrapped in towels inside a cooler, does the same job.
- Cream of Wheat then and nowThen as now a fine-milled farina from the inner part of the wheat kernel. Buy plain rather than instant; the instant grades are pre-gelatinised and will collapse into paste under a long hold.
- YieldAbout two modest breakfast servings. Serve with milk or cream and sugar; the half teaspoon of salt is doing real work and should not be cut.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, sold on fuel economy and on freeing the cook from tending a range — boil for ten minutes at night, eat at seven in the morning. Cereal was its showpiece, since long slow hydration suits whole grains and does no harm to farina. Cream of Wheat itself is generally traced to a North Dakota flour mill in the 1890s, where millers packaged the fine middlings normally treated as a by-product.