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Wheatena (Have in an enamelled pan half)
Have in an enamelled pan half pint water and half pint milk; season with two saltspoons salt. Then let slowly come to a boil on a moderate fire; gradually dredge in five ounces wheatena, continually mixing while adding it, and allow it to gently boil for five minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Remove, pour into a deep dish and send to the table with cream or rich milk, and sugar separately.
A plain milk-and-water porridge from the era when packaged breakfast cereals were new enough to need cooking instructions in a cookbook. The proportions here make a very stiff mush by current standards.
- The measurementsHalf a pint of water and half a pint of milk is one cup of each, two cups of liquid in all. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon.
- Five ounces of cereal is a lotWheatena weighs roughly 4 oz to the cup, so this is about 1 1/4 cups of dry cereal to 2 cups of liquid — closer to 2:1 than the 3:1 or 4:1 the modern box calls for. Expect a dense, spoon-standing mush; add another cup of liquid if you want a pourable porridge.
- Wheatena still existsIt is toasted whole wheat farina, coarser than Cream of Wheat and nutty from the roasting. Any toasted wheat cereal behaves the same way here; untoasted farina will taste noticeably blander.
- Why enamelledMilk scorches easily, and iron or unlined copper can react with foods; enamel over steel or iron was the period's usual non-reactive lining. Any heavy-bottomed modern saucepan does the job, but keep the heat moderate and stir the bottom.
- "Dredge in"Means sprinkle the dry cereal through your fingers or from a shaker in a thin stream into liquid already at a boil, whisking the whole time. Dumping it in at once is the one reliable way to get lumps.
- Cooking timeFive minutes at a gentle boil suits a fine modern grind; older, coarser milling often wanted longer. Taste at five minutes and keep going if the grains are still gritty, adding hot liquid as it thickens.
- Yield and serviceTwo to three bowls. Cream and sugar go to the table separately, as written, which is worth keeping — the porridge sets quickly and a splash of cold cream at the table loosens it again.
Wheatena is one of the older surviving American breakfast cereals, generally traced to the late nineteenth century and long associated with New Jersey manufacture; it is often remembered now for sponsoring the Popeye radio serial in the 1930s. Its appearance in a book of international cookery is a small marker of a large shift: for most of the nineteenth century breakfast porridge meant oatmeal, hominy or Indian meal that the cook bought loose and boiled for an hour or more, while by 1900 the grocery shelf was filling with branded, pre-toasted, partly processed grains that cooked in minutes. A cookbook of this period had to tell readers how to handle the new products, perhaps because packet instructions may not yet have carried the authority they later became.