[Sca-cooks] Re: cold cereal and milk

[Jeff Gedney]

Excuse me... 

But was it not unknown to make a breakfast of stale or 
toasted bread, crumbled in a bowl with milk or custard
poured thereon?  

"Milk Toast"  

The first packaged precooked cereal for use with milk was 
probably invented in 1863 by James Jackson. It was 
essentially a prepared Milk toast, made of hardened loaves 
of unleavened whole grain bread, not unlike Ships biscuit, 
and broken into little pieces and served it for breakfast 
after soaking the brittle chunks overnight in warmed or 
fresh milk. Jackson appears to have named this mixture 
"granula". 

( nota bene: Grape nuts are still made the same, using a 
twice baked barley loaf run through a grater, and toasted
again )

In 1877, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg created a similar cereal 
called he also called granola, made from toasted rolled 
whole grains. 
This was was served the same way, though it's texture 
allowed one to skip the long overnight soak, for a quick 
breakfast. Then in 1902 Kellog invented Korn Flakes, trying 
to make use of cheaper more plentiful corn. 
As Corn toasts soaked in milk or buttermilk was already a 
common food in the South, it was not a stretch to try to 
granola-ize corn. By drying it in flakes it vastly 
increased shelf life, and improved texture.

Shelf life, achieved by baking out all the moisture, was 
a major consideration in the success of this form of 
breakfast. 

Just as a note, It is likely that the first advocate of a vegetarian cold breakfast of essentially crakers and milk 
was Dr Sylvester Graham, who invented a Graham crakers partly 
as a way to return fiber to the meat and dairy heavy 19th 
century American diet (to which he ascribed all sorts of 
medical problems from cancer to sexual disfunction). 

I believe that Kellogg was a student/partner of Jackson's, 
Jackson founded the Sanitarium that Kellogg was to run at 
the close of the 19th century, and Jackson was very heavily 
influenced by Graham. Jackson was a member of the Seventh Day 
Adventists, who founded the Sanitarium based on Graham's 
principles.  

C.W. Post probably got the idea for his cereals, including 
Grape Nuts, when he was a patient at "the San".

SO I think it probably all goes back to Dr. Sylvester Graham.

Porrige does not seem to have entered into the milk on 
cereal concept.
It is just as likely that the notion of putting milk into 
oatmeal came from habits and tastes acquired eating cold 
cereal, not the other way around. 

Many people prefer their oatmeal without milk. 
I know I do. A little butter and maple or cinnamon and 
sugar is preferable to me. 

Capt Elias
Dragonship Haven, East
(Stratford, CT, USA)
Apprentice in the House of Silverwing

-Renaissance Geek of the Cyber Seas
- Help! I am being pecked to death by the Ducks of Dilletanteism! 
There are SO damn many more things I want to try in 
the SCA than I can possibly have time for. 
It's killing me!!!

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Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;
Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give
To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea,
Breasting the lofty surge: O, do but think
You stand upon the ravage and behold
A city on the inconstant billows dancing;
For so appears this fleet majestical,
Holding due course to Harfleur. 
  - Shakespeare - Henry V, Act III, Prologue