Cereals
Measure into your granite kettle, water required, salt to taste, stir in your cereal slowly and boil 5 minutes. Remove to cabinet for 3 or 4 hours or over night. Oat Flakes-1 cup oats to 3 cups water. Leave 4 hours or more. Oatmeal-1 cup oats to 4 of water, 4 hours or more.
Cream of Wheat-1 cup wheat, 6 of water, 4 hours or more. Cornmeal Mush-1 cup meal, 4 cups water, 4 hours or more. Boiled Rice-1 cup rice, 5 water or milk, 2 hours or more.
This is a fireless-cooker page: the grain is brought to a boil on the range for five minutes, then transferred to an insulated "cabinet" that holds the retained heat while the starch finishes swelling. The method only works in the vessel it was written for, and the holding step is where it fails in a modern kitchen.
- The "cabinet" is a fireless cookerNot a cupboard. It is an insulated wooden or metal box, packed with felt, asbestos or hay, into which a tightly lidded pot of boiling food was lowered and shut up. Without that insulation the pot simply cools.
- Why the holding step is unsafeCooked cereal and rice held for four hours or overnight in an uninsulated container passes straight through 40-140F. Bacillus cereus spores are common on grain and rice, survive the five-minute boil, and germinate readily in warm wet starch; the toxin they produce is not destroyed by reheating. This is the mechanism behind what is now called fried rice syndrome.
- An insulated cooker does not fix it eitherA modern thermal cooker or vacuum flask is designed and tested for specific fill volumes and hold times. A cup of grain in six cups of water, boiled five minutes and left overnight, gives no assurance the contents stay above 140F for the whole period, and the original gives no temperature at all to check against. Use a current recipe for whichever cereal you want.
- The milk version is the worst caseThe boiled rice line offers milk in place of water. Warm milk plus cooked starch, held for hours, is a growth medium for more than B. cereus alone.
- Granite kettleGranitewear, or graniteware, is speckled enamel over sheet steel, not stone. Chipped enamel exposes the steel beneath, so old pieces are generally kept as display items now.
- Cream of WheatA brand of farina, that is, coarsely milled endosperm of wheat, first sold in the 1890s and still on shelves. The six-to-one water ratio here reflects the long soak rather than a stovetop cooking time.
- Oat flakes and oatmealAt the time these were two distinct goods: rolled oats, and the coarser cut or ground meal.
Fireless cookery had a brief, intense vogue in American kitchens between about 1905 and the First World War, promoted in women's magazines and domestic-science bulletins as a way to save coal, save labour and keep a summer kitchen cool. The idea is generally traced to the Norwegian hay box, a crate of insulation into which a boiling pot was buried, and it arrived alongside a wave of commercially manufactured cookers with soapstone discs and asbestos linings. Breakfast cereal was its showpiece application: whole grains and coarse meals of that era genuinely wanted an hour or more of cooking, and a cook who could start the porridge at bedtime and lift it out hot at breakfast had bought herself a morning. The compressed table of ratios here, one line per grain, is characteristic of the household compilations of the period, which assumed the reader already owned the cooker and needed only the numbers.