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Cracked Wheat
Two quarts salted water to two cups best white winter wheat; boil two or three hours in a custard-kettle: Or, soak over night and two or three hours in a custard-kettle: Or, soak over night and boil at least three-fourths of an hour: Or, put boiling water in a pan or small tin bucket, set on stove, stir in wheat, set in steamer and steam four hours: Or, make a strong sack of thick muslin or drilling, moisten wheat with cold water, add a little salt, place in sack, leaving half the space for wheat to swell in. Fit a round sheet of tin, perforated with holes half an inch in diameter, to the inside of ordinary kettle , so that it will rest two or three inches from the bottom; lay sack on the tin, put in water enough to reach tin, and boil from three to four hours, supplying water as it evaporates. Serve with butter and syrup, or cream and sugar. When cold, slice and fry; or warm with a little milk and salt in a pan greased with a little butter; or make in griddle-cakes with a batter of eggs, milk, and a little flour, and pinch of salt. and a little flour, and pinch of salt.
A whole-grain breakfast porridge with five interchangeable cooking methods, all of them long. The text has some printer's duplication — a repeated line and a repeated phrase at the end — which does not change the method.
- Custard-kettleThis is a double boiler: an inner vessel of grain and water set over simmering water in an outer pan. It is far less likely to scorch than a pan over direct heat, which is presumably why times of two or three hours are given without further instruction.
- What "best white winter wheat" isWhole wheat berries rather than flour; the multi-hour times fit intact grain better than the cracked wheat of the title. Soft white winter wheat tends to cook softer than hard red, which will want the longer end of every time given. Modern bulgur, parboiled and dried, is a different product and cooks in ten to twenty minutes.
- Cracked versus wholeIf you use cracked wheat proper, the times collapse — roughly 20 to 30 minutes in a covered pan, or an hour in the double boiler. The multi-hour figures here only make sense for intact berries.
- Water ratioTwo quarts to two cups is 4:1, generous because so much evaporates over three hours. In a covered double boiler or a modern lidded pot, closer to 3:1 is enough; check and add boiling water rather than starting with a flood.
- The soak is the useful shortcutOf the five methods, the overnight soak followed by 45 minutes of boiling is the one worth adopting. Soaked berries hydrate fully and then only need to soften.
- The pudding-sack methodThe muslin bag on a perforated tin disc is a steamer improvised from a stockpot. A steamer basket or a heatproof plate set on a canning ring does the same job. The instruction to fill the sack only half full matters — wheat roughly doubles.
- SaltAdd it at the start, as written. Whole grains take salt slowly and taste flat if it is stirred in at the end.
- Yield and the leftoversTwo cups of dry berries gives about six cups cooked, enough for four to six. The closing directions — chilled, sliced and fried, or beaten into a griddle-cake batter with egg, milk and flour — are the point of making a large batch.
Long-cooked whole wheat was a standard nineteenth-century American breakfast, promoted by health reformers who argued that refined white flour had been stripped of what mattered. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) gives a string of five alternative methods, which suggests kitchens variously equipped — a double boiler, a steamer, or only a plain kettle and a length of muslin — though that reading is inference from the list rather than anything the book states. The perforated tin fitted to the inside of a kettle is a homemade fix of exactly the kind these books traded in, and the pudding-sack itself was old technology by then, used for boiled puddings since the seventeenth century. The final note — slice the cold mush and fry it, or work it into griddle cakes — reflects a household economy in which a grain cooked for four hours over a wood fire was expected to feed the family more than once.