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Laboratory Exercises (General Rules for Cooking Put)
General Rules for Cooking. 1. Put water and salt in upper part of double boiler and place over fire. 2. When water is boiling, add cereal slowly so as not to stop the boiling of the water. 3. Boil until just too thick to pour, occasionally lift the mixture lightly with a fork to keep it from sticking. (If it is stirred vigorously with a spoon it will become sticky and pasty.) 4. When it is thick enough, place it over hot water and cook from one to four hours.
Note. Cereals should always be cooked twice as long as required by the directions given on the package.
Rolled Oats with Bananas. 1 C. oats 2 C. water t. salt 3 bananas 1. Follow general rules for cooking and cook one hour. 2. Wet individual cups in cold water, pack cereal in cups, let stand five minutes, then turn into individual cereal bowls. 3. Surround with sliced bananas and serve with cream. Note. Sliced peaches, stewed apples or stewed prunes may be used instead of bananas. Some prefer a cereal too soft to be molded. In that case place fruit on top of cereal.
Cream of Wheat with Raisins.
C. Cream of Wheat 2 C. water t. salt 1/4 C. Sultana raisins 1. Follow general directions for cooking and cook one hour. 2. Stir in the raisins ten minutes before removing the cereal from the stove.
A domestic-science laboratory exercise rather than a family recipe: the general rules come first, then two applications. The numbers in the ingredient lists have been partly lost in transcription, so read them as proportions.
- The missing fractions"t. salt" and "C. Cream of Wheat" have dropped their fractions in the transcription, and the exact amounts cannot be recovered. Comparable manuals of the period use somewhere between a half and a full teaspoon of salt per cup of dry cereal, and a fine cereal like Cream of Wheat takes a smaller proportion of grain to the 2 cups of water. The oats-to-water ratio of 1:2 gives a stiff cereal, which suits one meant to be molded.
- The double boiler is the whole methodEverything hinges on step 4: the cereal is started over direct heat only long enough to thicken, then finished over hot, not boiling, water. This is what allows an hour or more of cooking without scorching or a skin forming.
- Fork, not spoonThe instruction to lift with a fork rather than stir with a spoon is sound. Vigorous stirring ruptures the starch granules and gives the gluey texture the note warns about.
- Cooking times have been overturnedThe advice to double the package time, and the range of one to four hours, assumes the thicker-cut rolled oats and coarser grains of the period. Modern rolled oats cook in five to ten minutes and instant oats in about a minute; an hour over hot water will likely reduce them to paste. Steel-cut oats or cracked wheat are the closer match and take 30-40 minutes.
- MoldingWetting the cups keeps the cereal from gripping; five minutes is enough to set a stiff porridge. A modern soft porridge will not turn out cleanly, which is why the note offers the fruit-on-top alternative.
- Sultana raisinsSeedless golden raisins from the sultana grape. Any golden raisin works. Ten minutes in the hot cereal is to plump them, not to cook them.
- YieldOne cup of dry oats with two cups water makes roughly three cups of cooked cereal, enough for three or four small molded portions.
Manuals like this one belong to the household-arts movement that put cookery into American schools around the turn of the twentieth century, and the vocabulary shows it: not a recipe but a "laboratory exercise," beginning with general rules and then their application. Long cooking of cereals was an article of faith in the period, defended on the grounds that thorough cooking made starch more digestible, and the instruction to double whatever the package said follows from that same reasoning. Cream of Wheat, a farina milled from wheat, had been sold since the 1890s and was one of those branded products; that the book names it directly, alongside generic "oats," marks the moment when packaged cereal was becoming standard enough to teach from. The molded portions turned out into individual bowls and ringed with sliced fruit are a small lesson in service as much as cookery, which was very much part of the curriculum.