Home › Entrées › Farina Cakes with Jelly
Farina Cakes with Jelly
2 cups scalded milk ½ cup farina (scant) 1/4 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 egg Mix farina, sugar, and salt, add to milk, and cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring constantly until mixture has thickened. Add egg slightly beaten, pour into a buttered shallow pan, and brush over with one egg slightly beaten and diluted with one tablespoon milk. Brown in a moderate Cut in squares, and serve with a cube of jelly on each oven. square.
A stiff sweetened semolina pudding, chilled firm, glazed with egg and browned. The printed text has scrambled lines — the instruction reads "Brown in a moderate oven. Cut in squares, and serve with a cube of jelly on each square."
- FarinaFarina is finely milled wheat, the product sold as Cream of Wheat; it is close to, but not the same as, semolina, which is milled from durum. Use the plain, non-instant kind; quick-cooking versions thicken in a few minutes and can go gluey with long cooking.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, when it steams and bubbles ring the pan. Scalding was routine in the era before pasteurized milk was general. Two cups of milk to a scant half cup of farina gives a very thick paste.
- Double boilerTwenty minutes of constant stirring over water is not padding — farina catches and scorches easily over direct heat. A heavy saucepan on low will work if you stir without stopping, but the double boiler is the safer route.
- Tempering the eggThe single egg goes into the hot cooked farina off the heat. Beat a spoonful of the hot mixture into the egg first, then return it, or you will get threads of scrambled egg through the pudding.
- Chill before cuttingThe recipe is silent on this. The poured layer wants to be set firm before browning and before cutting; a shallow pan and time in a cool place will do it.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350–375°F. You are only setting and colouring the egg wash on top; the interior is already cooked, so watch it rather than timing it closely.
- The jellyA firm, tart, clear jelly is what the period intended — currant above all, or crabapple or quince. Modern soft-set preserves will slump rather than sit as a cube.
- YieldDepending on the size of the pan, this cuts into something like eight to twelve squares.
Farina puddings can sit among the entrées rather than the desserts because a cooking-school dinner of the period used the entrée slot for small, made dishes served between the fish and the roast — often mild, moulded and enriched, and not necessarily savoury. Farina itself was one of the new industrial cereals of the late nineteenth century: finely milled wheat middlings sold in cartons, marketed as digestible invalid and nursery food, and taken up by cooking-school teachers. Cookery books of the era are full of these cheap starch bases dressed up with an egg glaze and a spot of bright jelly — a technique that turns a bowl of porridge into something that can be plated. The currant jelly cube was a standard garnish of the era, used with equal freedom on meat and on sweets.