The science of soggy cereals and a lesson in how to compose far less readily digestible patent applications

Our relationship with cooked cereal owes much to Louis J Lee, of Rochester, New York. Thanks to him, we no longer need chew the stuff as much as before.

Lee solved a problem he described in 1963 in a patent document:

"[cooked cereals] tend to become pasty on cooking and to lose particle texture and flavour on prolonged heating ... In many commercial eating establishments, particularly in cafeterias, it is customary to cook up a large batch of a cooked cereal ... After several hours on a steam table it is not unusual for cooked cereal to become a congealed, gelatinous mass. As a result, the batch is unappetising and usually is dumped into a garbage can without further ado."

Lee also gave us a professional definition of "cooked cereals". These, he wrote,

"are prepared foodstuffs of grain ... which usually must be cooked for a short period of time in boiling water in order to be in a normally edible condition.... cooking causes the dehydrated grain particles to absorb water and to soften, making the same palatable and digestible."

Lee is an unsung hero of modern quick-cooking cereal. His innovation was, from a chemist's point of view, simple (though breakfasters may find it rather oversyllabic). The Lee method is to cook the cereal mixed "with an edible monoglyceride of the chemically saturated type."

Three decades earlier, William C Baxter of Newtown, Connecticut looked at a different aspect of the cereal-chewiness problem. Baxter found out what happens when you combine shredded wheat with ice cream.

This hybrid foodstuff, Baxter wrote in a patent obtained in 1936,

"is really delectable only when the cereal pieces, when taken into the mouth with an intermingled mass of ice cream, are in fairly crisp condition, by which I mean a condition such that these cereal pieces are not yet soggy, although somewhat moist along and immediately below their superficies".

Baxter's patent might, in the long run, be best remembered for one passage:

"In the ordinary eating of shredded wheat biscuit with milk or cream, if a thin milk is used and the biscuit is allowed to soak even for a comparatively short time in a pool of such milk, the dish is an unappetizing and highly unsatisfactory one, except to those who for lack of teeth or otherwise, enjoy mush, whereas, if the lacteal fluid employed is a heavy or medium cream and if the biscuit and such fluid are together consumed even by a very slow eater, the pieces of the biscuits spooned off or otherwise segregated for each bite carry suitable portions of the lacteal fluid on their surfaces and within their interstices and yet there is a certain definite and desirable crisp-chewability retained by said pieces."

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

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