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General Directions for Cooking Cereals
Use a double boiler or two sauce pans, one a trifle larger than the other. Fill the larger sauce pan or lower part of double boiler full of water and put the water needed for the cereal in the other vessel. When the water boils add the salt and cereal slowly so that the water does not stop boiling and let boil for ten minutes. Place the pot with cereal into the double boiler and cover and let steam. If the cereal seems to be too thick, add boiling water. The oatmeal, hominy and other coarse grain cereals are improved by soaking overnight in water. They should be cooked in the water in which they have been soaked.
A method rather than a formula: the book gives no quantities, no timings for the steaming stage, and no indication of which cereal it has in mind. What follows fills in the numbers a modern cook needs.
- The hinge: direct heat first, then steamThe ten minutes of hard boiling over the flame starts the starch gelatinising and sets the texture; the long covered steam over water finishes the grain without scorching or constant stirring. Cooking entirely in the double boiler is slower and can leave the grain underdone, while boiling on direct heat throughout risks a scorched pan bottom unless the cereal is stirred.
- Water ratios, since none are givenSteel-cut oats and cracked wheat take about 4 parts water to 1 part grain; rolled oats about 2 to 1; coarse hominy or grits 4 to 5 to 1. Salt is roughly 1/2 teaspoon per cup of dry cereal.
- How long to steamRolled oats need roughly 20 to 30 minutes after the boil; steel-cut oats and cracked wheat 45 minutes to an hour; whole hominy or coarse grits up to two hours. The book gives no timing for the steaming stage at all; these figures are modern estimates rather than anything it states.
- "Double boiler or two sauce pans"The improvised version is a saucepan set inside a larger one of boiling water, not resting on the bottom. Keep the lower pan topped up; it will boil dry over a two-hour steam and the smell of a scorched pan is the first warning.
- Hominy is not grits, quiteIn this period "hominy" may mean whole or coarsely broken alkali-treated (nixtamalised) corn, which needs long soaking and hours of cooking, though the word was also applied to coarse grits. Modern instant oats and instant grits are pre-cooked and will turn to paste under this treatment; use them by their package directions instead.
- Soaking waterThe instruction to cook grain in its soaking water is sound, since dissolved starch and minerals stay in the pot. Soak overnight in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and expect soaked grain to cook somewhat faster than unsoaked.
- YieldA cup of dry steel-cut oats or grits gives about 3 to 4 cups cooked, enough for four. Cooked cereal thickens as it cools; thin it with boiling water, as the original says, not cold.
Cooked grain for breakfast was the backbone of the American morning table well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks of this sort treated it as a technique to be learned once rather than a dish to be looked up. The long double-boiler steam belongs to the era of the coal or wood range, which held a low steady heat for hours with no attention, making an overnight soak and a two-hour finish entirely practical. The instruction to add cereal slowly without checking the boil is the standard defence against lumps, the same principle behind pouring polenta or semolina in a thin stream.