Home › Fireless Cookery › Pettijohn's Breakfast Food
Pettijohn's Breakfast Food
1 cup cereal 1½ teaspoons salt 3 cups water Stir the cereal into boiling salted water, allow it to boil for five minutes and place in cooker over night.
The method here is fireless cookery: bring food to a boil, then seal it in an insulated box to coast on stored heat. For a starchy cereal left standing all night, that is the part which does not survive modern food-safety knowledge.
- The overnight hold is the problemA hay box or fireless cooker has no heat source. A quart of cereal sealed in one falls out of the safe hot-holding range (above 135F) within a few hours and spends the rest of the night at lukewarm temperatures.
- Why grain specificallyCooked cereal grains commonly carry Bacillus cereus spores, which survive boiling and germinate readily in a warm, moist, starchy medium. The emetic toxin they produce is heat-stable, so reheating the porridge in the morning does not undo it. This is the same mechanism behind illness from rice held warm overnight.
- Five minutes of boiling is not a sterilisationThe initial boil cooks the wheat and kills vegetative bacteria, but it does nothing to spores. The recipe relies entirely on retained heat that a domestic cooker cannot maintain for eight or ten hours. Use a current recipe for overnight or slow-cooked porridge instead.
- What Pettijohn's wasA branded rolled-wheat cereal with the bran left in, sold in the United States from the late nineteenth century and later part of the Quaker line. It is long discontinued; the nearest equivalent in texture is coarse rolled wheat or cracked wheat, not instant oats.
- YieldOne cup of dry rolled wheat to three cups of water gives roughly four modest breakfast servings.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households between about 1900 and the First World War: an insulated wooden box packed with hay, felt or shredded paper, into which a boiling pot was lowered and shut up for hours. It saved fuel, freed the cook from tending a range, and suited exactly this sort of job, a coarse whole-wheat cereal that wants long, gentle hydration before breakfast. That Mrs. Fryer gives the instruction under a brand name rather than a grain name says something about the period too: packaged breakfast cereals were new enough to be worth naming, and Pettijohn's, with its bran retained, was marketed on the health claims that surrounded whole grains in those decades. The technique reappears today in the vacuum flask and the electric slow cooker, both of which solve the temperature problem the hay box could not.