Cooking with wholegrains

This volume which I am introducing is published because of the increasing interest in wholegrains throughout the world, an interest now being intensified by Gayelord Hauser’s books on food and good health. Of a necessity, a quite different set of recipes is needed for wholegrain cooking than for cooking with germless commercial meals and flour. In using wholegrain products, the relationship between dry and liquid ingredients is different, and other ingredients change in amounts, and especially the knack of combining them. For example, wholegrain corn and wheat contain considerable natural sweetness, and therefore it is never necessary strongly to fortify them with sugar, as must be done when cooking with tasteless and lifeless commercial flour. It occurred to me that my wife probably knew as much about cooking with wholegrains as any other woman not because of her particular genius as a cook (although she is an excellent one), but because in all these years we have been operating the stone mill here in Vermont I have given her nothing to cook with but wholegrain products! Perforce, she has cooked with them. And over the years from experience she has learned to cook well. Not only have I lived and thrived but our two boys (now seven and nine in age) have more energy than I ever thought possible to cram into so small a space. Being a fellow who believes that things must work to be good, I was forced to the realization that my wife was the only person to prepare this cooking book. So this year she has been hard at work. Every recipe in this book has been cooked, not clipped. Every recipe in this book has been eaten, not sold. Many recipes in this book have been tried time and time again until the right blend was achieved. ; I am proud to see that my wife has not committed the cardinal sin of some cooks I have seen and tussled with, and I refer to the sin of using any sugar at all in Southern, or Rhode Island johnnycake, hoe cake or whatever you prefer to call it. Having eaten and drunk my way pleasantly from New Orleans to Philadelphia, I take off my hat to those lovely ladies of the South, who know by nature that wholegrain corn meal tickles the palate with its own natural sweetness, and that it is as sacrilegious to add sugar to corn dishes as it would be to erect a statue of Sherman in Atlanta. Further, while those charming ladies of the Providence Plantations still swear by white corn meal, which I claim exhibits less than half the flavor and natural sweetness of yellow, I am ready to forgive this fall from grace on the ground that in my early days in their nation I relished with no little gusto the classic Rhode Island johnnycake, flavored with bacon fat, covered with South county butter, and washed down with a beer that was, the last I heard, : still made in those parts, and a credit to the country. : My wife won’t admit it, but I am of course somewhat of a cook | myself! I sneak into the kitchen, particularly in the morning, and knock off muffins or pancakes, at will. However, if I were to write the recipes in this book, they would go something like the one for flapjacks I made last Sunday morning. I give you my recipe for what it may be worth:— : My Flapjacks Dump some Irish or Scotch oatmeal into a large dish and into that some wholegrain wheat flour. Mix these together with the hands so that lumps are broken up. Then shake some baking powder out of the can : into the mixture, and some salt. Mix again. In another dish beat up THE MYSTERY OF THE MILL 15