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Cracked Wheat
Have a pint cold water and half pint cold milk in a saucepan; season with half teaspoon salt and let come to a boil, then add half pint cracked wheat, mix well with a wooden spoon and gently cook for fifteen minutes, lightly mixing occasionally to prevent burning at the bottom. Pour into a hot, deep dish and serve with cold milk or cream and sugar separately.
A plain breakfast porridge, and the proportions are sound: three parts liquid to one part grain, cooked until the water is absorbed. A few points of translation.
- The measures in cupsA pint of water is 2 cups, half a pint of milk 1 cup, and half a pint of cracked wheat 1 cup. The grain is measured by volume, not weight, which is why the ratio comes out at a clean 3:1.
- Cracked wheat is not bulgurCracked wheat is raw wheat berries broken between rollers; bulgur has been parboiled and dried before cracking. Bulgur will be soft in 10-12 minutes, raw cracked wheat often wants 20-25, so taste rather than trusting the clock.
- Add the grain to boiling liquidStarting the wheat in cold liquid gives a gluey, pasty porridge. Raining it into liquid already at a boil, while stirring, keeps the grains distinct.
- Why the milk goes in at the startThe milk is what makes this richer than a water porridge, and it is also what scorches. Keep the heat low once the grain is in and stir down to the bottom of the pan, not just around the top.
- A double boiler is easierPeriod cookbooks often finish cracked wheat over water for this reason. A double boiler largely removes the burning risk, though the gentler heat means the grain will want longer than the fifteen minutes given here.
- YieldA cup of dry grain makes roughly 3 cups cooked, or three generous breakfast servings.
- Serving it hotThe instruction to warm the dish is not decoration. Cracked wheat stiffens fast as it cools, and cold milk poured over a cold bowlful sets it into a solid mass.
Cracked wheat appears in many American and European household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the hot breakfast cereal was still made from a whole grain broken at the mill rather than from a boxed flake. The same section of a period cookbook will often offer oatmeal, hominy, farina and cracked wheat in near-identical form, each cooked in salted water or water and milk and sent to the table with cold cream and sugar handed separately -- a habit that kept the porridge hot in the dish while the milk stayed cold. Breaking wheat into coarse grain is an ancient technique across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, where the parboiled version, bulgur, has been a staple for centuries; the plain unparboiled grain became familiar on Western breakfast tables alongside the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for whole-grain cereals as wholesome food.