Farina
3 tablespoons farina. 1 pint boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt Cook the mixture in a double boiler for about one hour.
A loose-leaf page reduced to almost nothing: the printed line gives the water and the salt but not the farina itself, which was presumably on the facing leaf or lost when the sheet was filed. What survives is a method rather than a formula.
- The missing ingredientNo quantity of farina is given, and there is no way to recover it from the page. Cereal ratios in books of this period often run somewhere around four or five parts water to one part farina by volume, which would put a pint of water at roughly half a cup of grain — but that is inference, not what the book says.
- A pint is two cupsSixteen fluid ounces. American pints in household books of this era match the modern measure; the older British imperial pint of 20 ounces does not apply here.
- What farina isCoarsely milled endosperm of hard wheat, sold today as Cream of Wheat or generic farina, and close kin to semolina. It is not cornmeal and not the same as the "farina" sold in Italian shops, which is simply flour.
- Add it to boiling water, whiskingThe hinge of the dish. Farina sifted slowly into water already at a rolling boil, with constant stirring, stays smooth; dumped in at once it sets into lumps that no amount of double-boiler time will break up.
- The hour in the double boilerModern instant and quick farina cooks in two to five minutes and will not stand an hour's cooking. Long double-boiler times like this one are standard for cereals in books of the period, whatever the grind; if you want the method to make sense use a coarser, non-instant farina, and check for tenderness rather than watching the clock.
- Why a double boiler at allDirect heat scorches a starch this fine, and holding a steady low simmer on a coal range meant fiddling with dampers or shifting the pot to a cooler spot. Over water the cereal cannot much exceed 212F and needs little attention, which is why many breakfast grains in these books are cooked this way.
- Filed under CakesCooked farina stiffens as it cools, and period books do describe pouring such mushes into a shallow pan, chilling, slicing and frying them in butter — which may be why the page sits where it does. Served that way it takes syrup, jam or a dusting of sugar.
- YieldWith no farina quantity on the page any yield is guesswork; a pint of water would make roughly three or four breakfast servings of porridge.
Farina came into American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century as roller milling made it possible to separate wheat endosperm cleanly and cheaply, and by 1900 packaged wheat cereals were a fixture of the middle-class breakfast table. Cookbooks of the period treat all such grains — oatmeal, hominy, cracked wheat, farina — as a single class governed by one rule: boiling salted water, then long, gentle cooking over water rather than flame. Mrs. Fryer's book, issued in loose-leaf form so a housekeeper could rearrange and add pages, is a product of the same domestic-science moment that produced standardized cup measures and cooking schools; the cereal pages in these books read less like recipes than like tables of ratios and times. The habit of chilling leftover porridge, slicing it and frying it is older than the packaged cereal and shows up wherever a grain mush is eaten — Italian polenta, Southern fried grits, scrapple — which is presumably how a breakfast cereal ended up filed among the cakes.