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Cracked Wheat Pudding
Mrs. A. M. Lewis.
Cook cracked wheat enough for two meals; stir in a few minutes before taking up, raisins, dates, or any dried fruit; next day prepare a custard as usual, and stir thoroughly through the wheat, and bake just long enough to bake the custard ; thus you have two desserts with but little trouble. Very palatable and nutritious.
A two-day recipe built around leftovers: yesterday's breakfast porridge becomes tonight's baked pudding. The original assumes you already know how to cook cracked wheat and how to make a custard, so both need filling in.
- Cracked wheatCoarsely cracked whole wheat berries, sold today as cracked wheat or coarse bulgur. Bulgur is parboiled and cooks faster; untreated cracked wheat wants roughly 1 part grain to 3 parts water, simmered 20-25 minutes until tender but still distinct.
- "Enough for two meals"Reckon about 1 cup dry cracked wheat, which yields roughly 3 cups cooked. Half is eaten hot as porridge, half goes into the pudding.
- "A custard as usual"Period custards vary; a workable proportion is 2 to 4 eggs and about 2 tablespoons sugar to each pint (2 cups) of milk, with a pinch of salt and often nutmeg or a little vanilla. Scald the milk, temper it into the beaten eggs, then stir the mixture through the cold wheat.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, only "bake just long enough to bake the custard." A slow to moderate oven, about 325F, suits a custard; higher heat curdles the eggs and weeps water out of the pudding.
- Water bathSet the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides. Nineteenth-century ranges baked unevenly and cooks relied on this; it is still the difference between a smooth set and a grainy one.
- Doneness40-50 minutes for a 1 1/2-quart dish. The center should still wobble slightly and a knife an inch from the edge come out clean; an instant-read thermometer shows about 175F. It firms further as it cools.
- The dried fruitStirred into the hot wheat at the end so it plumps in the residual steam. Raisins, chopped dates, dried figs or apricots all work; if the fruit is very dry, soak it briefly first or it will pull moisture from the custard.
- YieldServes 5 or 6. Good warm or cold, with cream, and it keeps three days refrigerated.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from contributions by named housewives and sold as a charitable fundraiser: the Chicago volume of the mid-1870s in aid of a home for the friendless, and the Toronto volume, which reprinted much of it, in aid of a children's hospital. That origin is why so many of its entries read like advice passed over a fence rather than formal instruction. Mrs. Lewis's contribution is thrift cookery of a very particular kind: cook once, eat twice, and turn the surplus into something that reads as dessert. Cracked wheat itself carried a mild moral charge in this period, promoted by health reformers in the wake of Sylvester Graham as a wholesome whole-grain alternative to white flour, and the phrase "nutritious" at the end of the recipe is doing deliberate work. Pairing the grain with a baked egg custard follows the same logic as rice pudding and bread pudding, both of which take a cheap cooked starch and make it company-worthy with eggs, milk and sugar.