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Germea
Place in a saucepan one pint cold water, two gills cold milk and a saltspoon salt. Let come to a boil, then add half pint yellow Germea. Mix well with a wooden spoon, slowly cook for ten minutes. Pour into a hot dish and serve with cold milk, cream and sugar separately.
A hot breakfast cereal built around a proprietary product that no longer exists. The proportions still work; you only need to decide what goes in the pot.
- The measuresTwo gills is one cup, so the liquid is 2 cups water plus 1 cup milk. Half a pint of dry cereal is 1 cup, giving a 3:1 liquid-to-grain ratio. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- What Germea wasA branded granulated wheat cereal, usually associated with the Sperry Flour Company. The recipe's 'yellow' implies more than one variety was sold, though what distinguished them is unclear. Farina or Cream of Wheat is the closest current stand-in; if you read the yellow as a corn product, use fine yellow cornmeal or polenta instead.
- Timing depends on the grainTen minutes suits fine farina. Coarse yellow cornmeal or polenta at this ratio wants 20 to 30 minutes over low heat, and it will thicken well past porridge if you walk away from it.
- The hingeAdd the dry cereal to boiling liquid in a thin stream while stirring, and keep the wooden spoon moving for the first minute. Dumping in a cupful at once gives you lumps that will not break up later.
- Heat controlMilk in the pot scorches on the bottom once the mixture thickens. Drop to the lowest steady simmer after the first boil and scrape the base of the pan, not just the middle.
- ServingThe cold milk, cream and sugar passed separately is the point of the dish, not a garnish. Warming the serving bowl matters more here than it sounds, since a thick cereal chills fast.
- YieldOne cup of dry cereal makes three to four breakfast servings.
Hot breakfast cereals were a growth industry in the decades either side of 1900, and cookbooks of the period name brands freely: Germea, Ralston, Wheatena, Cream of Wheat, Force. Germea is generally traced to the Sperry Flour Company of San Francisco, a milled wheat cereal sold in more than one grade, which is why the recipe bothers to specify the yellow. Its appearance says less about international cuisine than about how a professional cook of the era worked: he wrote down the product he actually used, assuming the reader knew the box. When the brand left the shelves the recipe became unreadable, which is the usual fate of instructions that lean on a trademark rather than on a grain.