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Wheatena Griddle Cakes
2 cups cooked wheat-½ cup cold water ena 2 eggs teaspoonful bakingpowder teaspoonful salt Flour Thin the cereal with water, add well-beaten eggs, and about a half cup flour sifted together with baking-powder and salt. Bake a trial cake on griddle to determine exact amount of flour needed.
Hominy may be used instead of, or in combination with, wheatena.
The text has come through the scanner scrambled — the ingredient column and the method have collided — but the method itself is sound and self-correcting, since it tells you to fry a trial cake before committing.
- What the ingredient list actually saysRead it as: 2 cups cooked Wheatena, ½ cup cold water, 2 eggs, a teaspoonful of baking powder, a teaspoonful of salt, and flour. A stray "1½ cups flour" sits at the end of the scrambled text; its place in the recipe is unclear, and the instructions themselves call for about ½ cup to start.
- A teaspoonfulPeriod measures were not fully standardised, so treat this as roughly a level modern teaspoon. One teaspoon of salt against two cups of cereal is on the assertive side if your Wheatena was already salted when cooked — taste the porridge first and scale back.
- WheatenaA toasted whole-wheat farina, sold in the United States since the late nineteenth century and still on shelves. Any cooked wheat cereal, cream of wheat, or leftover farina behaves the same way. "Hominy" here most likely means cooked hominy grits rather than canned whole hominy, though the recipe does not specify.
- The trial cake is the hingeCold cooked cereal varies enormously in stiffness depending on how long it sat, so no fixed flour quantity works. Cook one small cake, and if it spreads thin and tears, beat in more flour a spoonful at a time; if it stays domed and gummy, thin with water.
- Consistency to aim forThe batter should fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon rather than pour. Break up any lumps of set cereal against the side of the bowl with a fork before the eggs go in, or they will show as pale gluey spots in the finished cake.
- Griddle heat and timingMedium heat, lightly greased. These are heavier than a plain flour pancake and take longer on the first side — the surface bubbles less freely, so go by the colour of the edge rather than by bubbles setting.
- YieldAbout a dozen cakes four inches across, enough for three or four people.
This belongs to the small genre of thrift cookery in which using up the breakfast porridge was framed as a household duty rather than a curiosity. Cooked cereal reheats badly and sets into a solid block in the pan overnight, and the block can be slackened with water and egg and put back on the griddle ta into fried squares or cold rice into cakes. The presence of a brand name in the title is worth noticing: Wheatena was one of the packaged cereals of the period, and cookbooks increasingly assumed readers stocked the box rather than the grain. The direction to bake a trial cake, rather than to measure exactly, is characteristic of the era's writing, which expected the cook to judge by eye and hand.