To be honest, I’d never even eaten cream of wheat before… well, maybe once. I wondered, “Can I make homemade cream of wheat?” That’s when I spotted it – my jar full of whole wheat berries I grind to make bread. What could I make with the food I already had in the house? I was also craving something healthy and nutritious after eating fast food on the road, and didn’t want to resort to a bowl of cereal. I didn’t even have the energy or forethought to soak oatmeal the night before, my typical go-to brekkie when I don’t have anything planned. We typically have sourdough oatmeal pancakes with eggs and our favorite smoothie.īut you know the post-traveling drill – it takes a few days to get everything up and running again. Last week, we had just returned from a trip to visit family and I had nothing healthy planned for breakfast the next morning. Learning to Make Homemade Cream of Wheat Porridge It was published in Needlecraft Magazine from 1921 to 1923.This homemade cream of wheat recipe with freshly ground wheat is the most deliciously simple breakfast porridge! Sweet, nutty, creamy – perfect for all your favorite fruit toppings. Despite ongoing protests, Rastus remains the personification of Cream of Wheat cereal today.Īdvertisement is from the collections of the New York Public Library. The proceeds from this campaign built 2218 Lake of the Isles Parkway, a grand mansion for Emery Mapes on the city’s most elite lake. In this 1921 advertisement, Rastus was depicted as barely literate. The image of the former slave–“Rastus” –was central to the success of this product, which made company founder Emery Mapes millions of dollars. The artfully-depicted scenes on the packages curried nostalgia for a simple and wholesome era of American life, when racial and ethnic hierarchies were unquestioned. Using four-color printing the company cultivated desire for what was an inexpensive commodity. Cream of Wheat used innovative advertising and branding to create value for consumers. It pioneered a strategy that would prove central to the city’s economy by the 1920s, as Buffalo superseded Minneapolis as the nation’s milling capital. The Cream of Wheat company moved to the Mill City to ensure advantageous shipping rates and a dependable supply of the middlings necessary for its cereal. But the product was an enormous success, despite the desperate economic conditions of the country in 1893. The image was offensive like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, this figure solidified white stereotypes of happy black servants. Short on capital, miller Emery Mapes designed the packages for the “breakfast porridge” himself, emblazoning the cartons with an image of a jolly African-American chef he called “Rastus” after the cheerful simpletons depicted by Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus books. Over the next 100 years, he was welcomed into households across the country.įour years earlier– a group of North Dakota millers devised a way to turn wheat middlings–a byproduct of wheat milling–into a lavishly packaged “breakfast cereal” they called Cream of Wheat. “Rastus” was the symbol of the Cream of Wheat company, which relocated to Minneapolis in 1897 from North Dakota. At a moment when Minneapolis had a very small African American community, the city became home to “Rastus,” an iconic caricature of a black man.
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