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Graham-Flour Mush
Put one breakfast cupful of Graham flour into a basin with a teaspoonful of salt and form it into a smooth paste with a small quantity of cold water; then mix in gradually nearly one quart of boiling water. Turn the whole into a saucepan and boil it for twenty minutes, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. When cooked turn the mush onto a dish, and serve it with cream and sugar.
A plain boiled porridge of the sort that filled American breakfast tables before packaged cereal. The whole recipe hinges on slaking the flour in cold water first, so it does not seize into lumps when the boiling water goes in.
- The slurry stepWhisk the flour to a smooth, thin paste with cold water before any hot liquid touches it. Graham flour hydrates fast and will clump irreversibly if boiling water hits dry flour.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole-wheat flour with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat flour is the closest match; ordinary fine whole-wheat works but gives a smoother, less nutty mush.
- A breakfast cupfulRoughly a standard 8-oz cup, though period breakfast cups ran a little larger. Treat it as one cup of flour to about a quart of water, and adjust with extra boiling water if it stiffens past the consistency you want.
- Twenty minutes of boilingThat is a real full boil in the original, over direct heat with constant stirring. On a modern stove drop to a bare simmer once it thickens, or the bottom is liable to scorch; a heavy-bottomed pan helps.
- SaltA teaspoon in one cup of flour is on the assertive side by current taste. Half a teaspoon is closer to what most people expect now.
- Consistency and settingIt thickens further as it cools, and a mush turned out onto a dish was expected to hold its shape. Leftovers set firm enough overnight to be sliced and fried in butter, as was commonly done with cornmeal mush.
- YieldSomething in the region of three and a half to four cups of cooked mush, serving three to four with cream and sugar.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures pressed Americans toward coarse unbolted wheat, cold water and abstemious living. Boiled grain mushes -- cornmeal, oatmeal, hominy, wheat -- were an ordinary American breakfast before the boxed cereals out of Battle Creek displaced them, and the habit of frying yesterday's cold mush in slices survives in fried cornmeal mush.