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Rolled Wheat
1 teaspoon salt 2½ cups water Have the water boiling directly over the fire. When it boils rapidly stir the cereal in with a fork to prevent lumping. Let it boil slowly five minutes; place in the cooker and let it remain for four or five hours, or over night.
A fireless cooker was an insulated box, usually lined with felt, hay or asbestos, into which a covered pot of boiling food was sealed to finish on its own stored heat. The method translates directly to a heavy pot in a well-wrapped blanket, a wide-mouth vacuum flask, or a slow cooker on low.
- ProportionsThe water and salt are given, but the amount of rolled wheat is not stated. A workable figure is about one cup of cereal to the two and a half cups of water called for, giving two to three breakfast servings.
- Rolled wheatFlattened whole wheat berries, sold today as wheat flakes and found in health-food and bulk aisles. Rolled oats behave similarly but cook faster and absorb slightly less water; cracked or bulgur wheat is not a substitute here.
- The five minutes matterThe brief hard boil is what gelatinises the starch and gets the pot as hot as it will ever be. Everything after that is coasting, so do not shorten it or the cereal will still be chalky in the morning.
- Stirring in with a forkAdding the flakes in a thin stream to rapidly boiling water, agitating constantly, is the whole anti-lump technique. Dumping them in at once gives you a solid raft.
- Holding it overnightAn insulated box holds cooked grain for hours in the warm range where Bacillus cereus spores, which survive boiling, can germinate. If you want breakfast porridge with no morning work, cook it in a slow cooker set to low so it stays hot throughout, or cook it the night before and refrigerate, then reheat.
- Making a modern cookerBring the pot to the boil, clamp the lid, and bury it in towels inside a cooler or a lidded crate. Preheating the empty container with hot water first helps it hold heat longer.
- FinishingOvernight cereal thickens hard. Loosen it with a splash of milk or water over heat before serving, and salt again at the table if needed.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households from about 1905 through the 1920s, promoted in extension bulletins and women's magazines as a way to save fuel and free the cook from tending a range all day. The principle is simply retained heat: food is brought to the boil on the stove, then sealed into an insulated chest where it coasts down slowly over hours. Breakfast cereals are often said to have been among the showpiece applications, since whole grains want long gentle cooking and could be started after supper and eaten at dawn with no one watching the pot. Rolled wheat, like rolled oats, was a product of the nineteenth-century roller mills that could flatten a steamed grain between chilled rollers by the the 1870s and 1880s, and it sold in the same era and often the same aisle as the new packaged breakfast foods.