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Ralston's Breakfast Food
1/2 cup cereal 3 cups water 1 teaspoon salt Allow the water to boil hard, add salt and slowly stir in the breakfast food, being careful not to allow it to lump. Boil slowly for five minutes and place in the cooker over night.
A fireless-cooker breakfast: the grain is boiled briefly at night and left in an insulated box to finish in its own retained heat. The method still works, but the overnight hold is the part that needs thought.
- What Ralston's wasA whole-wheat breakfast cereal, roughly the coarseness of a fine cracked wheat, sold by the company that later became Ralston Purina. Any coarse wheat cereal — cracked wheat, Wheatena, or a similar unrolled wheat meal — behaves the same way in this ratio.
- The ratio is deliberateSix parts water to one part cereal is much looser than a stovetop packet direction. It is set for long, slow absorption in a cooker rather than fifteen minutes on the heat, and the grain will drink nearly all of it by morning.
- The fireless cookerA wooden or metal box packed with hay, felt or mineral wool, holding a close-fitting pot. It cooks nothing; it only slows heat loss. A modern vacuum thermal cooker or a wide-mouth food thermos filled with boiling water first is the nearest equivalent.
- Preheat and fillRetained-heat cooking depends on mass. A part-filled pot in a cold cooker loses temperature fast, so use a pot the cooker is sized for, fill it, and drop it in the instant it comes off the burner.
- Not lumpingThe instruction to add the cereal slowly to hard-boiling water is the hinge. Rain it in through your fingers while stirring; wheat meal dumped in at once sets into lumps that no amount of overnight soaking will break up.
- The overnight holdEven a good cooker falls out of hot-holding range within a few hours, and cooked cereals and rice can support Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling. Modern practice is to cool and refrigerate cooked grain rather than leave it warm all night; if you want the convenience, soak the grain cold overnight in the fridge and boil it in the morning.
- The stray lineThe "1/2 cup rice" at the end is almost certainly a run-on from the adjacent fireless-cooker formula rather than an ingredient for this one. Ignore it.
- YieldAbout three cups of cooked cereal, enough for three or four bowls. A teaspoon of salt is right for that volume and should not be cut much, as unsalted wheat porridge tastes flat.
Ralston's Breakfast Food takes its name from the Ralston Health Club, a mail-order health movement of the 1890s generally traced to Albert Webster Edgerly, who published under the pen name Edmund Shaftesbury; a St. Louis miller licensed the name for a whole-wheat cereal, and the brand outlived the movement as Ralston Purina. Its appearance in a fireless-cookery chapter is unsurprising: Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book dates from the years when insulated cookers were being promoted to American housewives as a fuel-saving, labor-saving device, and hot breakfast cereal was among the dishes such books returned to most often, since it required no browning, no watching, and could be started after supper and served at dawn. Whole-grain cereals also carried something of the moral weight of the period's health reformers, who preferred them to the fried meat and hot bread of the earlier American breakfast table.