By Brian Boone

Did we wake you up by merely suggesting the smell of a hot breakfast? Well, February is National Hot Breakfast Month, so Uncle John cooked up these origin stories about some of Americans’ favorite hot breakfast foods.

Cream of Wheat

In 1893, head flour miller Tom Amidon of the Grand Forks Diamond Milling Company in North Dakota, came up with a way to efficiently process and use the wheat his employer handled every day. Also known as farina, Amidon found a way to crack the wheat grains, then removed the hearty bran, leaving behind the endosperm. The whitest part of the wheat, Amidon ground it into very fine granular material, then found it tasted pretty good when heated and mixed with hot water and warm milk. Amidon took his idea to his mill’s owner, George Bull, and his brother Fred came up a name for the product: Cream of Wheat, because the end product was a cream-like white. The Grand Forks Diamond Milling Company was in danger of going out of business (there was an economic depression happening in 1893), and so it took a big swing with Cream of Wheat, sending some samples on a rail car of flour bound for its investors in New York City. They ordered a full train car of Cream of Wheat. By 1897, the spun-off Cream of Wheat Company was selling 15,600 cases a year; the company and its one product came under the purview of Nabisco in 1961. 

Grits

Similar to the ancient dish of oatmeal and the newer Cream of Wheat in that it’s a hot cereal, grits as a dish as we know it today was created by the Muscogee Nation, when that group resided in what is now Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and Tennessee. That explains why the dish is so strongly associated with Southern cuisine — it was invented there. The Muscogee taught European settlers how to make the dish: the hard, ovary wall of corn kernels are removed, and the rest of the nugget is dried, finely ground, and then it’s all cooked in salted water or milk. The name came from the European settlers: grits is from grytt, an Old English word meaning “coarse meal.” 

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Porridge

We’re all familiar with the concept of porridge from childhood stories and nursery rhymes — Goldilocks had a hankering for the stuff, and there’s that song about “peas porridge hot,” for example. But even if you think you’d never eaten porridge, you probably have. It’s an umbrella term for any grains or cereal cooked into a mush and served hot and then topped with nuts, spices, fruits, or sweeteners. Oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, congee, polenta, and grits can all be considered types of porridge.