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Pettijohn Food
Place in a saucepan a pint cold water, half pint milk, half teaspoon salt and let come to a boil. Add half pound Pettijohn. Mix well with a wooden spoon and slowly boil for forty minutes, occasionally stirring at the bottom to prevent burning. Pour into a hot, deep dish and serve with cold milk or cream and fine sugar separately.
A plain boiled breakfast cereal built around a brand of flaked whole wheat that no longer exists. Any rolled or cracked wheat stands in, with adjustments to the liquid and the clock.
- What Pettijohn wasPettijohn's was a flaked whole-wheat breakfast cereal, coarser and heavier than rolled oats and containing bran. Rolled wheat flakes, or a coarse cracked wheat, are the closest current equivalents; steel-cut oats behave similarly but taste different.
- The measuresA pint is 2 cups and a half pint is 1 cup, so the liquid comes to 3 cups. Half a pound of rolled wheat is roughly 2 to 2 1/4 cups by volume, though flake size varies enough that weighing is the safer route.
- That ratio is stiff3 cups of liquid to about 2 cups of grain is barely 1 1/2 parts liquid to one part grain, which gives a very thick porridge that will stand up in the spoon. Modern rolled wheat is usually cooked at 3 to 4 cups liquid per cup of grain; add water as it thickens if you want a looser result.
- Forty minutes is for the old grainThe long boil suggests a heavier, thicker flake than what is sold now. Contemporary rolled wheat is generally done in 15 to 20 minutes and cracked wheat in 25 to 30; taste rather than trusting the clock, and stop when the bran softens.
- ScorchingA thick cereal on direct heat catches at the bottom in minutes. Keep it at a bare simmer and scrape the base of the pan with the wooden spoon, or set the pan in a double boiler, where scorching is far less likely.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in 3 cups of liquid is light by modern taste for whole wheat. Salt goes in with the water, not after, or the grain reads flat.
- ServingServes three to four. The cold milk and sugar are handed round separately on purpose, so each eater thins the porridge to their own liking; a heated serving dish matters because the cereal sets quickly as it cools.
Pettijohn's was one of the flaked whole-wheat breakfast foods that flooded American groceries in the 1890s, when milling companies discovered that a cooked cereal could be sold as a branded package rather than scooped from a barrel. Its wrapper carried a bear, and the line is generally traced to a California firm before it passed into the hands of the large cereal combine that became Quaker Oats. That a cookbook of this period prints a recipe for a proprietary product tells you how new the category still felt: the cook needed to be told the water-to-grain ratio and the cooking time for a food that had no traditional method behind it. The forty-minute boil also marks the era before pre-steamed, thin-rolled flakes made breakfast a five-minute affair, and the instruction to serve cold milk and fine sugar in separate dishes reflects a table where porridge was dressed by the eater, not the cook.