Cereal breakfast foods should be prepared at night while the fire for supper is hot. Measure the required quantity of boiling water into the cooker kettle; add salt and cereal; let boil 10 minutes and place in box over night. Reheating in the morning will probably be necessary. In winter enough for two or three breakfasts may be cooked at once and reheated as wanted. The food in the inner kettle should be cooked about five minutes before placing in the outer kettle. Then the whole should stand over the flame until the water boils in the outer kettle. Any other kind of breakfast cereal may be cooked by adopting these general directions.
The raw cereal breakfast foods, such as plain oatmeal, hominy, cracked wheat, etc., cost less than those which are partly cooked by steam at the factory, but frequently housekeepers prefer not to use them because they require so many hours of cooking. A cooking box, however, is especially well adapted for cooking just this sort of material. Even the cereal preparations which are partly cooked at the factory and are supposed to need only a few minutes cooking to make them ready for the table are much improved by long, slow cooking such as they get in the cooking box. The flavor and texture of cereal breakfast foods are influenced by the length of time they are cooked, and with the cooking box it is easily possible to secure the texture and flavor dependent upon long, slow cooking.