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Farina with Milk
Have a pint boiling milk in a small enamelled pan on the fire. Gradually add two gills farina, sharply mixing with the whisk while adding it. Add two tablespoons granulated sugar. Mix well and let cook for fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while. Stir in one raw egg yolk and serve with cold milk.
A milk-thickened semolina porridge of the kind eaten for breakfast or given to invalids and children. The proportions and the cooking time both need adjusting for modern farina.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of farina is a full cup against a pint of milk. That is around three times the cereal most modern boxes call for and will set into a very stiff mass; a third to a half cup for a pint of milk gives a spoonable porridge.
- Farina then and nowFarina is finely milled wheat endosperm, close to what is sold today as Cream of Wheat, though true semolina is durum wheat. Period farina was unenriched and was probably coarser, which may be part of why the original cooks so long.
- Cooking timeFifteen minutes suited coarser period granulations. Modern farina runs from about ten minutes for the original grind down to two or three minutes for quick-cooking and under a minute for instant; cooking beyond what the grind needs only drives off milk and risks scorching.
- Adding the grainThe hinge of the dish. Rain the farina in a thin stream with the whisk moving hard the whole time, or it will seize into lumps that no amount of later stirring will break up.
- The enamelled panMilk and cereal catch and scorch easily, and enamelled ware was the usual recommendation for cooking milk. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat does the same job; keep the spoon moving across the bottom.
- The egg yolkStirred in raw at the end as an enrichment rather than a thickener; the recipe does not say whether the pan comes off the fire. Add it to a little of the hot cereal first and then return it to the pan, and use a pasteurized egg if the porridge is for a child or anyone else who should avoid undercooked yolk.
- SugarTwo tablespoons for a pint is modest by modern breakfast standards but noticeable; add it at the end if you would rather judge by taste.
- YieldServes two to three as written. The cold milk poured over at the table is not optional garnish — it loosens what is otherwise a very stiff spoonful.
Farina is simply the Latin word for meal or flour, and in American usage it settled onto finely ground wheat milled from middlings — the coarser endosperm fraction separated out from the bran and germ in roller milling, which spread through American flour mills in the 1870s and 80s and left millers with a marketable by-product. The best-known branded version, Cream of Wheat, is generally traced to a mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in the 1890s, and by the time this book appeared such cereals were fixtures of the hotel breakfast sideboard and of the sickroom tray alike. A milk-cooked semolina porridge finished with an egg yolk is also thoroughly European: the same dish appears in German cookery as Griessbrei and in Italian kitchens as the basis for semolino puddings.