Preparing the Original 1895 Recipe For Corn Flakes

Max Miller of Tasting History prepared the original corn flakes recipe as prescribed in 1895 by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. As he was waiting for the finished product, Miller discussed the dubious practices that took place at Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. The sanitarium was Kellogg’s center for holistic health that encouraged sunbathing, hydrotherapy, yogurt enemas and eventually more extreme methods of purity.

One of the most famous names in the history of breakfast is John Harvey Kellogg  who made it his life’s mission to heal the minds and  bodies of America albeit through some weird even sadistic practices …but one of the more tame curatives he promoted and probably his most lasting legacy was the invention of Corn Flakes, the breakfast  cereal which I’ll attempt to make using instructions from the original patent.

Miller also talked about how his put-upon brother William Kellogg eventually took the reins of the company after the success of Corn Flakes, breaking away from his brother’s influence, which was argued in court.

John claimed that he was the first to use Kellogg for a cereal which he was, and he was the famous Kellogg he was the doctor that everyone knew but William said that he had basically turned Kelloggs into the country’s biggest cereal producer and made the name a household name synonymous with cereal, and after 10 years the courts sided with him and so he changed the company’s name in 1922 to the Kellogg’s Cereal Company.

The brothers never reconciled, as an apology letter from John to William was placed in a filing cabinet instead of being sent.

There was no reconciliation because the letter never got to William or at least didn’t get there right then because while John dictated the letter it was his assistant who wrote it down. And she felt that it was beneath her employer’s dignity to apologize in such a manner, and so instead of sending the letter she put it into a filing cabinet and there it sat for 8 years long after John had died and they never really reconciled.