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Granula Pudding
Granula is claimed to be a healthful dietetic of the same order as graham flour. It is apparently parched wheat ground like corn meal, coarsely. It makes a pudding resembling Indian meal pudding. Make it precisely as directed for farina, either boiled or baked. See Nos. 377 and 420. Use 4 cups of milk or water to 1 cup of granula.
Had it not seemed perfectly useless to ask so simple a creature as that I should certainly have tried to learn some more various uses of the magnificent chestnuts which we picked up in passing through the grand old manor grounds but the fear of having her shortly answer, "Why roast them in the bars and eat them" deterred me. If there were no larger and better chestnuts than these sold so plentifully and cheaply on the streets there would not be much inducement even for the famous monkey and catspaw business being followed, of placing chestnuts between the bars of open fire places till they burst and fly out, but the Spanish and British chestnuts are of a larger growth. Good old Horace Greeley, or at least the paper under his direction, at one time became very earnest in recommending the extensive planting of chestnut trees in the west. It concerns us here only to hope that the result may be after a while plenty of chestnuts of the large variety, wherewith to compound the European chestnut puddings.
For hotel cooks who have little time to peel and scrape the small chestnuts in quantities, the following two pudding receipts will probably be found sufficient, at least till we come to frozen puddings among the ices. There is a meal-colored, dumpy little elf, down stairs, chuckling audibly and saying there is a good deal more in dumplings than a little Short Paste knows. The language is that of Marguerite, but the accent is either that of Hans or Gretchen. The German elves are generally meal-colored. Queer old German stories there are of some of them going in a rolic to some tyrannical baron's granaries in the myterious small hours of night, grinding all the wheat in a few minutes in the baron s own mill and carrying the bags of meal with many a laugh to all the widows' and orphans' homes without so much as marking them C. O. D. The noisiest of those below is only "Davy Dompling, boiling in the pot," but it appears from the talk that dumpling is a German word, and is not much different in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
There must be something in dumpling worth going to Rhineland to see about, but this chestnut pudding has to be made and steamed and baked first. The English and French receipts always prescribe certain numbers of chestnuts, as two or three dozen. It takes from 150 to 200 of the plentiful American chestnuts to weigh a pound, hence the uselessnes of such receipts.
The instruction here is a ratio and a cross-reference; everything after the second sentence is the author digressing about chestnuts and German dumpling elves. What you need is the 4:1 proportion and the farina method it points to.
- What granula wasA commercial health food first made in the 1860s and still sold through the 1870s and 80s: whole-wheat dough baked hard, broken up and re-baked, then coarsely ground. The author's guess that it is "parched wheat ground like corn meal" is close enough for cooking purposes. The nearest modern stand-ins are coarse cracked wheat or a hard baked wheat cereal of the Grape-Nuts type, though the latter is sweetened and will need the sugar cut back.
- The proportion4 cups milk or water to 1 cup granula. That is a loose porridge going into the dish; the grain swells and the pudding sets as it cooks. Do not thicken it at the outset.
- Boiled or bakedBoiled means cooked in a double boiler or a basin set in simmering water until thick, then turned out. Baked means poured into a buttered dish and left in the oven; the book specifies neither heat nor time, but a slow oven of about 300F for 1 1/2 to 2 hours suits it, stirring once or twice in the first half hour so the grain does not settle in a layer at the bottom.
- What the farina recipe would have suppliedNos. 377 and 420 are not given here, but farina puddings of this period were commonly finished with salt, sugar to taste, a little butter, and two to four eggs beaten in once the mixture had cooled below scalding, plus nutmeg, lemon rind or vanilla. Add the eggs off the heat or they will curdle.
- Indian meal puddingThe dish it is said to resemble is cornmeal pudding, cornmeal being "Indian meal" throughout nineteenth-century American cookbooks. That is a useful guide to texture: soft, spoonable, closer to a baked custard-porridge than to a cake.
- YieldOne cup of grain to four of liquid gives roughly six modest servings. Serve warm with cream, or with a fruit sauce; a plain granula pudding is austere without one.
- The chestnut passageNothing in the long digression applies to this pudding. It belongs to the chestnut pudding recipes that follow, and the note that 150 to 200 American chestnuts weigh a pound is the author's argument against European recipes that count chestnuts by the dozen.
Granula belongs to the first wave of American manufactured breakfast foods, which grew out of the water-cure and vegetarian reform movement rather than out of the grain trade. The name is generally credited to James Caleb Jackson, who produced a twice-baked whole-wheat cereal at his sanitarium in Dansville, New York, in the 1860s; a similar product later made at Battle Creek was renamed granola after a dispute over the word. The author's cautious phrasing, that granula "is claimed to be a healthful dietetic of the same order as graham flour," places it squarely in Sylvester Graham's lineage of coarse unbolted wheat as moral and digestive improvement, and registers a professional pastry cook's mild scepticism about health claims made for a product he cannot identify with certainty. That a hotel pastry book bothers to include it at all shows how far these reform cereals had travelled from the sanitarium dining room into ordinary commercial kitchens by the 1880s.