Cereal Coffee
Put eight tablespoonfuls of cereal coffee into a coffeepot, with one quart of cold water, and a piece of butter the size of a pea. Boil twenty minutes, and serve with hot milk or cream and sugar. Omit butter if cooked in a percolator. To make cereal coffee at home, take three pounds of whole wheat, one pound of whole barley, and roast in the oven, stirring constantly until well browned. When it is the color of coffee, add three tablespoonfuls of molasses and three tablespoonfuls of butter. Stir well, and when the grains become separated, set aside to cool and add one cupful of ground chicory. Grind and use as above.
Two recipes in one: a brewing method for commercial cereal coffee and directions for roasting your own grain substitute. Both are workable in a modern kitchen, with the caveat that grain brews need long extraction where real coffee does not.
- The hinge: it must actually boilRoasted grain's flavor sits largely in starch and caramelized sugars that need heat and time, and it depends less than coffee does on delicate volatiles that long boiling drives off. The recipe's twenty minutes reads as deliberate rather than an error carried over from old coffee practice; cut it short and the brew is thin. Keep it at a bare simmer with the lid on so you do not boil away much of the quart.
- ProportionsEight tablespoonfuls is half a cup of ground grain to one quart (4 cups) of water. That yields roughly three generous cups after simmering loss, so figure two to three servings.
- The butterA pea-sized piece of butter in a boiling grain infusion most likely works as a defoamer: fat keeps the starchy head from climbing the pot. At that quantity it can contribute little flavor. The recipe gives no reason for omitting it in a percolator, though the absence of an open rolling boil there is a plausible explanation.
- Oven for roasting the grainNo temperature is given. Work at 350F on sheet pans in a shallow layer, stirring every few minutes, and expect 30 to 50 minutes to reach a deep coffee brown. Higher heat scorches the outside of the kernels before the interior develops any sweetness, and scorched grain tastes of ash.
- Molasses and butter in the roastThese go in once the grain has reached the color of coffee, and they clump it. "When the grains become separated" means to keep stirring until the sticky coating dries and the kernels break apart again — otherwise you get a solid brick when it cools. The recipe does not say whether the pan comes out of the oven at this point. Cool completely before grinding or the sugars will gum the burrs.
- Grinding and storageGrind coarse, as for a French press; fine grain flour turns the brew to gruel and clogs a percolator basket. Roasted grain goes stale and rancid more slowly than coffee but is not immortal — keep it airtight and use within a couple of months.
- ChicoryOne cupful of ground chicory root to four pounds of grain. Sold today as roasted ground chicory in the coffee aisle or from spice merchants; it supplies the bitterness and body that wheat and barley alone lack. Raw chicory root will not substitute.
- ServingHot milk or cream, as the recipe specifies, and sugar. Grain brews are thin, and cold dairy dilutes and cools them further, so the call for hot milk is doing real work here.
Cereal coffee was the great commercial success of the American temperance and health-reform movement, and its presence in a book called On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon is no accident — reformers who campaigned against alcohol were often suspicious of caffeine as well, and roasted-grain drinks let a household keep the ritual of the breakfast cup without the stimulant. Postum, launched in Battle Creek in 1895, was the best known of dozens of brands built on roasted wheat, barley, bran, molasses and chicory, and the recipe given here is a homemade version of the same idea. Grain and chicory substitutes were far older than the health movement, however: chicory had been mixed into or sold in place of coffee across Europe since at least the Napoleonic blockades, and roasted barley drinks are traditional in their own right, still sold in Italy as caffè d'orzo and in Korea and Japan as barley tea. What dates this particular recipe is the confidence that a housewife would roast four pounds of grain on her own range rather than buy a tin.