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Cream of Wheat
Place in a saucepan a half pint each water and milk with three saltspoons, salt, and as soon as it comes to a boil add a half cup cream of wheat; lightly mix with a wooden spoon and let gently boil for thirty minutes, stirring at the bottom occasionally, pour into a hot deep dish and serve with cream and powdered sugar separately.
A plain farina porridge, written when the cereal was coarser and slower-cooking than what is on shelves now. The proportions still work; the timing does not.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt. That is well judged for two cups of liquid and can stand as written.
- Half pint eachA half pint is one cup, so the liquid is one cup water and one cup milk, two cups total, to a half cup of cereal. That is a 4:1 ratio and gives a soft, spoonable porridge rather than a stiff one.
- Cooking timeThirty minutes suited the coarse farina of the period. Modern Cream of Wheat and equivalent farinas are milled finer and cook in two to ten minutes depending on grind; check the box and stop when it thickens, or you will end up with glue.
- Adding the grainRain the farina into the boiling liquid in a thin stream while stirring, rather than dumping it in. Farina lumps instantly, and the original's 'lightly mix with a wooden spoon' fits that gentler handling.
- ScorchingMilk on the bottom of a saucepan catches long before the cereal is done. Use a heavy pan over low heat and scrape the base, or cook it in a double boiler, which period cookbooks often recommended for milk-based cereals.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this vintage powdered sugar means finely ground sugar for the table, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold now. Ordinary granulated or superfine sugar is the closer match.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid and a half cup of cereal make two modest breakfast servings, or one generous one.
Cream of Wheat began as a branded product rather than a generic dish: farina milled in North Dakota and marketed from the 1890s, it spread quickly enough that cookbook writers treated the trade name as the name of the grain, much as they did with gelatine and baking powder brands. Farina itself is nothing exotic it is the endosperm of hard wheat ground to a fine granule, a byproduct of roller milling that mills had every reason to sell rather than discard. Its appearance under "The World's Kitchen" in a turn-of-the-century international collection says less about geography than about the era's breakfast table, where hot milled cereals served with cream and sugar were taking their place alongside older porridges of oats and cornmeal in urban American households. The instruction to pass the cream and sugar separately is a small marker of formal service: the cook produced the plain cereal, and the table finished it.