Chances are, if we’re going to eat a whole grain at all, we do so in the morning: cereal out of a box, oatmeal from a package, or a bran muffin of some whole-ish pedigree. Why are whole grains so associated with our first meal of the day? Partly because they’re an easily prepared food.
Say, what? you might be thinking. I soak a batch of wheat berries overnight and cook them for 55 minutes and you have the nerve to call that an “easily prepared food”?
Not now. Not with a zillion-hour work week and college prep for kids starting in the crib. (Is he learning Mandarin yet? Is he? Is he?)
Instead, we have to go back in human history. Whole grains were crucial crops, not only for satisfying hungry clans, but also for getting those same clans to live near one another in the first place. Cultivated grains shaped our settlement patterns: the Fertile Crescent, the Nile delta, and the interior mountain coast of modern-day Mexico, as well as the Indus and Yangtze River ecosystems. We can locate our relationship with grains in our bones.
Quite literally. Bone density and trace element scans from human remains at archeological sites worldwide confirm the increasing importance of grains to human settlement. People tented together; they started eating grains—which left chemical markers in their bones.
Their teeth, too, showed the effects of the change in diet. The dental wear patterns for the maize-growing human communities of Central America were gentler and less pitted than those for clans still practicing a nomadic lifestyle and eating tough shoots, roots, and jerkylike dried meat. The grain-eaters exhibited the angular, sloped wear of modern teeth, rather than the flat, even, sawed-off look of hunter-gatherers.
In short, grains were the earliest convenience foods, not the complicated preparations of joints and braises over the fire, not something you had to go out and hunt, kill, bleed, gut, butcher, hang, and dry, but just a big pot of water (or broth or milk) put to a boil with handfuls of the dried seeds from the harvest.
Indeed, grains may have put an end to our wandering around. Although causal connections are cloudy in prehistory, grains might not have been an outgrowth of human settlement but the very reason for it. Our ancestors not only wanted to live near the storehouses to keep from starving; they also couldn’t very well transport those stores on horseback across the steppes or plains.
What’s more, despite the goat culture that developed in the Middle East in the Bronze Age and the pig culture that developed in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was a dearth of animal protein available to a growing, global population. In the Americas, amaranth and corn filled out the bill of fare; in Africa, sorghum and rice; in the Middle East, barley and wheat; and in Asia, buckwheat and millet—and much later rice.
These days, our brains may have thought up smart phones and Twitter, but our bodies are still in the tents. We developed biologically, socially, and gustatorially to require what grains provide. We thus connect them to what may be our most elemental meal: milk and carbs in the morning. And more elaborate fare as well—as you’ll see in the recipes ahead.
Our tour of grain mains starts simply, almost modestly—with granola and muesli, longstanding favorites in our home. The former is perfect for warm mornings. In our part of New England, that’s from July 10 to 15. The latter is for cooler mornings when the pops in the radiators wake us before the alarm clock does.
Either dish is a make-ahead. Make-weeks-ahead, in fact. In keeping with the origins of whole grain storage and human settlements, they’re breakfasts from the storehouse of your pantry! But do invest in a couple of sturdy, airtight, sealable containers. You don’t want to stumble down to breakfast only to find that ambient humidity has ruined your hard work by turning the grains soggy—or worse, rancid.
After those recipes, we turn to the first of many Middle Eastern dishes in this book: Syrian Sliha. It’s a mixture of nuts, wheat berries, and fruit that has become something of a make-ahead staple in our home when guests are on the way up from New York for a weekend in the country. It’ll keep about a week in the fridge, if well covered. We bet you’ll find it both new and comforting, an odd combo for a simple breakfast but one of the reasons you might turn to it again and again. It’s also terrific for Christmas morning with green pistachios and red pomegranate seeds.
We finish off this first section with several hot, whole-grain cereals—the last three are either made in a slow cooker or with a slow-cooker variation. That way, they can be thrown together the night before, no more than a quick stir before heading off to bed. And once the slow cooker clicks to “warm,” they can be kept covered in the appliance on the counter for a couple of hours, a good way to accommodate the varying schedules of a household. We find that the long, slow, even heat of the slow cooker mellows almost any whole grain into a lovely porridge, deeply satisfying in that way that only whole grains can be.
Among these recipes, you’ll find congee, the Chinese classic, a staple of workers on their way to their jobs at restaurants across this country’s many Chinatowns. Unlike the other fare in this section, it’s a savory breakfast—and so unusual by whole grain breakfast standards (or certainly by North American standards). Although congee is usually made with white rice, ours is (of course) made with brown. It’s made stovetop, but we also give you the directions for making it overnight in the slow cooker.
Try any one of these cereals and you’ll soon see why whole grains were pantry staples for millennia. They’re so satisfying, you might even find yourself out of bed before the radiator pops—or the air conditioner kicks in for the day. You might also be surprised when lunchtime rolls around without a hunger pang in sight. We can’t think of better morning news than that!