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Grape-Nuts
Place four heaping teaspoons Grape-Nuts on six saucers, pour a little thick milk or cream on the side, but not over, and serve.
An assembly instruction rather than a cooked dish, but the details are worth reading closely — the point of it is texture.
- The quantity is ambiguous"four heaping teaspoons... on six saucers" may mean four per saucer rather than four divided among six; the text does not settle it. Four heaping teaspoons is a small serving, on the order of two tablespoons.
- Saucers, not bowlsA saucer holds the cereal in a shallow layer, which is what makes the side-poured cream work. A modern shallow dessert or soup plate does the same job; a deep cereal bowl does not.
- Cream at the side is the whole instructionPouring alongside rather than over lets each spoonful pick up cream at the moment of eating, so the nuggets stay hard and crunchy instead of softening into porridge.
- "Thick milk" meant top milk"Thick milk" probably meant top milk -- before homogenization was general, cream rose and could be skimmed from the top of the bottle; the same term was sometimes used for soured, thickened milk. If top milk is intended, the nearest equivalents now are half-and-half or single cream, whole milk being thinner.
- The product is essentially unchangedGrape-Nuts is still a baked and ground wheat-and-barley nugget, so the recipe works as written with a box off the shelf.
- YieldSix servings, as given.
Grape-Nuts was introduced in 1897 by C. W. Post's Postum Cereal Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, the town that also gave the world Kellogg's corn flakes and the health-reform sanitarium culture that produced both. The name is generally explained by the sugar Post said was formed during baking, which he called grape sugar, together with the cereal's nutty flavour; there are no grapes and no nuts in it. Its appearance in a general cookbook of this period says less about cookery than about the new commercial breakfast trade, in which a branded box could sit in a chapter alongside dishes that took a morning to make. The insistence on cream at the side, rather than over, is the one genuinely instructive line.