Farina
1 cup farina. 4 cups liquid. Cook half hour. Serve with cream and sugar.
A skeleton formula of the kind that fills cereal chapters in early twentieth-century books, where the cook was assumed to know the method and needed only the proportion. Two things need translating: what farina is now, and how long it actually needs.
- What farina isFarina is finely milled wheat endosperm — essentially a fine semolina. The supermarket equivalent is Cream of Wheat or a generic "farina" hot cereal. Coarse semolina sold for pasta and gnocchi will behave differently and stay gritty at this ratio.
- The half hourThirty minutes suits a coarser, unenriched cereal cooked gently, and half-hour timings of this sort usually assumed a double boiler, though this recipe does not say so. Modern packaged farina is milled finer and thickens in two to three minutes; held for half an hour it turns to paste. Cook to the texture you want rather than the clock.
- LumpsThe hinge of the dish. Bring the liquid to a full boil, then rain the farina in slowly while whisking constantly. Farina dumped into still or barely warm liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will break up.
- The liquidFour parts to one gives a loose, pourable porridge; use less liquid if you want it stiffer. The recipe says only 'liquid': water, milk, or half milk and half water all fit, and milk needs more attention to keep it from scorching on the bottom.
- SaltThere is no salt here. About half a teaspoon per cup of dry farina makes the difference between bland and sweet-tasting.
- YieldOne cup of dry farina with four cups of liquid serves four generously as a breakfast cereal.
- ServingCream and sugar is the period standard. It also takes well to brown sugar, a spoon of jam stirred through, or fruit stewed and spooned over — and if poured into a shallow pan and chilled firm, the cold slab can be cut and fried in butter, a common thrift use for leftover cereal.
Farina reached American breakfast tables through the industrial roller mill: separating the starchy wheat endosperm from bran and germ and grinding it fine produced a cereal that cooked quickly, kept well, and looked reassuringly white at a time when whiteness signalled refinement. By the 1920s, when Mrs. Wilson was writing for Philadelphia newspaper readers and compiling those columns into books, packaged farina competed with oatmeal, hominy, and cornmeal mush in a cereal chapter that every general cookbook carried. Recipes this bare were normal there — the household needed the ratio and the cooking time, since the cereal itself came in a box with the name already on it. The double boiler was a fixture of the period kitchen, valued, so its makers claimed, because a long unattended cook on a coal or early gas range would not scorch.