The use of crushing rolls has also developed a great variety of new foods, such as cracked wheat, oatmeal grits, etc. These crushing rolls have sometimes been made hollow, and are steam heated, and as they crush the grain they simultaneously effect the cooking or partial conversion of the starch, and the product is known as hominy flake, ceraline, coralline, etc., which furnish popular breakfast foods when served with cream. [Illustration: FIG. 166.--DOUGH MIXER.] [Illustration: FIG. 167.--BRAKE, OR KNEADING MACHINE.] In the field of cookery such activity has been displayed that the average kitchen to-day is a veritable museum of modern inventions. Egg beaters, waffle irons, toasters, broilers, baking pans, apple parers, cherry stoners, cheese cutters, butter workers, coffee mills, corn poppers, cream freezers, dish washers, egg boilers, flour sifters, flat irons, knife sharpeners, can openers, lemon squeezers, potato mashers, meat boilers, nutmeg graters, sausage grinders, and frying pans in endless array; all patented and clustered around the modern cooking range as a central figure, and all presenting points of excellence in the matter of economy and convenience, or the betterment of result. The most extensive application of inventive genius is to be found in the large manufacturing bakeries, which make and sell the millions of pounds of crackers and cakes that fill the bins and shelves of the grocery store. In these manufactories the dough is prepared by a mixer, see Fig. 166, which consists of a spiral working blade revolving in a trough, and capable of handling half a dozen barrels of flour at a time. It is then put through a kneading machine, called a “brake,” shown in Fig. 167, and is then ready to be converted into crackers or cakes on a great machine 25 feet long, which finishes the crackers and puts them in the pan ready for the oven. This machine, see Fig. 168, receives the dough at A, where it is coated with flour and flattened into a sheet between rolls. It is then received on a traveling apron B, has the flour brushed off by a rotary brush C, and is then cut into crackers or cakes by vertically reciprocating dies D. At E a series of fingers press the cakes down through the sheet of dough, while the surrounding scraps are raised on a belt F and delivered into a suitable receptacle. The separated cakes at B′ are then delivered into pans at G, the pans being fed on the subjacent belt at G′. Such machines, costing nearly a thousand dollars, produce from forty to sixty barrels of crackers a day, enabling them to be sold at about 5 cents a pound at retail. [Illustration: FIG. 168.--CRACKER AND CAKE MACHINE.]