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Cracked Wheat with Raisins and Karo
1 cup cracked wheat 3½ cups water 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup Karo 1 cup raisins Combine the ingredients in a double boiler top and let stand several hours, then place over hot water, cover closely and steam, without stirring, four hours. Serve with light cream.
A promotional-booklet breakfast cereal from the era when hot grains were cooked overnight rather than in minutes. The method is sound but the timing belongs to a coal range that was hot anyway.
- KaroA brand of corn syrup, sold in light and dark grades; a recipe like this would most likely mean the light. Half a cup for one cup of dry grain is a sweet porridge by current taste; a third of a cup still reads as sweetened, and the raisins add more as they plump.
- Cracked wheat is not bulgurThis means raw wheat berries broken into pieces, which is why it wants hours. Bulgur has been parboiled and dried, so it will collapse into mush on this schedule. Buy cracked wheat or coarse wheat groats.
- The four hoursOver simmering water in a double boiler the grain never exceeds about 200F, so four hours is not an exaggeration for the vessel described. In a heavy covered saucepan over direct low heat the same cup of cracked wheat is done in 25 to 35 minutes, or overnight on low in a slow cooker.
- The overnight stand mattersThe stand matters -- the recipe has the grain sit in the water for several hours before any heat. That hydrates it and is what makes the unstirred steaming work; skip it and you risk hard centres.
- Do not stirStirring drags starch out of the broken grain and turns the whole thing gluey. The instruction is the hinge of the recipe, not fussiness.
- Light creamAt least 18 percent butterfat, commonly around 20. Half-and-half is the nearest thing most supermarkets stock, though it is leaner; whole milk works but reads thin against the corn syrup.
- YieldNearer five cups cooked once the raisins plump, so four to five breakfast servings. It reheats well with a splash of milk.
Karo appeared on American grocery shelves in the first years of the twentieth century, and the company behind it spent decades distributing small recipe booklets of exactly this kind, in which the branded syrup turns up in everything from breakfast cereal to icing. The dish itself is older than the sweetener: long, slow, unattended cooking of a coarse grain in a double boiler or fireless cooker was standard practice for breakfast porridge when a kitchen range held heat all night, and cookbooks of the period routinely tell the cook to set the cereal going before bed. Cracked wheat competed with oatmeal, hominy and "Indian meal" mush on the American breakfast table, and its long cooking time is a reminder that the quick-cooking rolled and steel-cut grains most people buy today are a later industrial convenience.