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Cracked-Wheat Porridge
Brush over the inside of a flat-bottomed saucepan with a small quantity of melted lard. Pour in four pints of water to boil, stir in one breakfast cupful of cracked wheat and one teaspoonful of salt; stir the wheat and boil it for a few minutes, then push the saucepan to the side of the fire, place the lid on and allow the contents to simmer for four hours. When cooked turn the porridge into a bowl and serve it with a jug of cream. The wheat should be well washed before being cooked to rid it of the flour, which is generally the cause of burning.
A coal-range breakfast cereal built for a stove that was never entirely off. The proportions and the four-hour simmer both belong to that setting rather than to a gas burner.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is the large cup of a Victorian breakfast service, usually reckoned at roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Read it as about 1 cup of dry cracked wheat, though the original is genuinely loose here.
- The water is not a misprintFour pints to one cup of grain is somewhere around an 8:1 to 10:1 ratio depending on which pint you read, well above what a modern package calls for. Some of it goes in evaporation over four hours on a range, but on a modern hob the result will be thin unless you reduce the water.
- Pushing to the side of the fireOn a coal or wood range, the area away from the firebox held a gentle, dropping heat, the equivalent of a burner on its lowest setting.
- Four hoursModern cracked wheat is fully soft in 20 to 30 minutes. Longer cooking is not harmful, only slower, but nothing is gained past the point where the grains have burst.
- Washing the wheatThis is the hinge, and the recipe says why: the loose flour clinging to freshly cracked grain settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan. Rinse in a sieve until the water runs clear.
- The greased panBrushing lard over the inside of the pan gave a bare-metal, uncoated saucepan some release. With a heavy-based modern pan it is optional, though a film of butter or oil still helps against a stuck skin at the bottom.
- Cracked wheat, not bulgurCracked wheat is raw wheat berries broken between rollers. Bulgur has been parboiled and dried first and will cook in a fraction of the time with far less water, so the two are not interchangeable here.
- Yield and servingAbout 4 to 6 servings. The recipe specifies only a jug of cream served alongside.
Cracked wheat and other whole-grain hot cereals were a fixture of American breakfast tables through the second half of the nineteenth century, promoted first by dietary reformers in the Graham mould and later by the young packaged-cereal trade. Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of so plain a dish in a book otherwise crowded with terrapin and canvasback is a reminder that a great hotel kitchen fed its guests every morning as well as at banquets, and that a four-hour simmer suited a range that was kept alight around the clock. The instruction to wash the flour off the grain reflects an era when cracked wheat came loose from a barrel or sack at the grocer's rather than sealed in a box, arriving dusty with its own meal.