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BREAKFAST CEREALS

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Some dietetists, who are neither cranks nor simpletons, disbelieve in cereals of whatsoever sort as a first course at breakfast. They urge that to spread a hot poultice all over the lining of the stomach is to relax and weaken that organ; that it goes to sleep, as it were, and is too inert to dispose properly of the rest of the meal.

Others are strenuous in the belief that the act of chewing is necessary to the proper assimilation of even semi-solids, and since few people think of chewing porridge, the value of it as nutriment is doubtful.

There is force in the latter demur. Children should be taught to chew porridge of all kinds, also bread and milk. One zealous dietist insists that milk—“the one and only perfect food”—ought to be masticated. The motion of the jaws excites the salivary glands, he says, causing the flow of a secretion most favorable to digestion.

As to the “hot poultice,” there is a grain of reason in the objection. As I have explained in urging the propriety of beginning breakfast with fruit, the coat of the stomach is masked, after the sleep of the night, by a thin mucus, which interferes with the task of the digestive agencies. If fruit is not eaten, a draft of cold water, not iced, will do the work in part. A few swallows of really hot water are better still. A sip of tea or coffee—or, perhaps, best of all, vichy, apollinaris or other good mineral water, may precede the nourishing cereal.

That it is nourishing when the stomach gets hold of it, is undeniable. Oatmeal builds up bone, and muscle, and brain; Indian meal mush and hominy are gently laxative and cooling to the blood; preparations of wheat are less laxative, and therefore safer in hot weather, and for teething children, than oatmeal in any form. Rice boiled tender in milk is both palatable and wholesome. Each and all of these should be eaten with cream, and except as a dessert, never with sugar. Children who are trained to eat porridge and milk, or cream, without sugar, find the addition of this unpleasant. It certainly tends to acidity of the stomach.

Every cereal, with the exception of rice, that needs any cooking needs a great deal of it. Soaking over night is indispensable to the excellence of most of them. Four hours of boiling make oatmeal good; eight hours make it better; twenty-four hours make it “best.”

Oatmeal

Soak over night. Even the varieties which are advertised “to require no soaking, and but fifteen minutes’ cooking,” are improved by this process. Turn a deaf ear to the charmer who would persuade you to the contrary. “Steam cooked” is often a delusion and a snare. Put your oatmeal into the inner vessel of your farina kettle, cover deep in cold water, put on the lid and set at the back of the range at bedtime. In the morning add boiling water, salt to taste, and draw to the front, filling the outer kettle with hot water. Cook steadily for an hour and as much longer as you can. My own taste is for oatmeal boiled to a jelly. It is as far superior to the ordinary preparation of the cereal as creamed cauliflower is to Dutch cabbage.

Send to table and eat with cream.

Never throw away oatmeal “left-overs.” Cook again, and yet again, always in a double boiler.

Hominy

Soak all night; cover with boiling water, slightly salted, in the morning, and cook for an hour. A delicious preparation of hominy is effected by cooking it in plenty of salted water until tender, turning off the water and supplying its place with cold milk. Bring to a boil and serve.

Cracked wheat

Cook as you would oatmeal. An hour’s boiling suffices.

Milk porridge

Heat a pint of milk to boiling. Into a pint of cold milk stir four tablespoonfuls of flour, and when this is smooth stir it into the hot milk. Cook in a double boiler for an hour, add salt to taste, and serve with cream.

Meal-and-flour porridge

Mix together two tablespoonfuls of Indian meal and the same quantity of flour, wet them with cold water, and stir into a cup of boiling water. Cook in a double boiler for half an hour, stirring often. Add salt, and beat in slowly a pint of scalding milk, cook, stirring constantly for fifteen minutes longer. Serve with cream.

Brewis (as made by our grandmothers)

Dry bread in the oven and crush with the rolling-pin into crumbs. Heat two cups of slightly salted milk, and when it boils, stir in a cupful of the dried crumbs. Add a tablespoonful of butter, and cook, beating steadily for five minutes. Serve hot with cream, or an abundance of sweet milk.

Rice

Wash a cupful of rice in two waters, then drop it slowly into two quarts of salted boiling water. The water should be at a galloping boil. Do not stir the rice once during the twenty minutes in which it must cook steadily. At the end of that time test a grain to see if it is tender, and if it is, turn the rice into a colander; shake this hard that the air may reach all the kernels, and set in the open oven five minutes before dishing. Each grain should stand separate from the rest.

This is the South Carolinian way of cooking rice, and the one and only right way.

Indian meal mush

Moisten a cupful of corn-meal with enough cold water to make it into a paste. Stir this paste into a quart of salted, boiling water, and cook, beating it hard and often, for an hour at least. If the mush becomes too stiff, add from time to time more boiling water.

Farina

A good, inexpensive cereal, which seldom appears upon the breakfast table. Yet it should have honorable mention.

Soak overnight. In the morning, stir it into boiling water, slightly salted, and cook half an hour, stirring up well from the bottom.

Each patented breakfast cereal has its champion. It would be invidious to name any of them here. Nearly all are founded upon wheat, corn, rye, barley or rice. Each is accompanied by full directions for the preparations of the same for the table.

Oatmeal, rice, mush, farina—any of the cereals that must be cooked before they are eaten—are delicious and nutritious when committed to the “hay-store” of which we are hearing so much.

The soaked cereal is cooked for five minutes after the boil begins, and the bubbling pot, closely covered, is set immediately in a nest made by hollowing out the hay with which a box is packed. The hay is pressed closely all around the pot, an old quilt is spread over all and the whole left untouched for five, six or ten hours. The cereal will be hot when served, and tender beyond compare.