Take 1 pint of oatmeal; pour on enough cold water to cover; let stand over night; strain and boil with a pinch of salt until thickened. Then add 1 cup of cooked small fruit, a lump of butter and sugar to taste. Let get cold and serve with cream.
An oat-starch pudding of the oldest kind: what you cook is the soaking liquid, not the grain. Everything depends on reading the word "strain" correctly.
- Strain means keep the liquidAfter the overnight soak it is the starchy water, not the spent meal, that gets boiled; this is the standard reading for a flummery, though the recipe does not spell it out. Press the solids firmly in the sieve to get the starch out.
- The oatmeal to useA pint here is 2 cups of dry meal by volume, and it should be pinhead or steel-cut oats, or coarse oatmeal. Rolled or instant oats break down in the soak and are unlikely to yield a clean starch liquor.
- Cold water, and only just enoughThe recipe says only 'enough cold water to cover', so keep close to that. Too much water gives a liquid too dilute to set, and the finished flummery will slump rather than hold a shape.
- ThickeningBring the strained liquid to the boil, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon; it goes from thin to thick quite suddenly. Keep stirring for a few minutes after it thickens so the raw-starch taste cooks off.
- Cooked small fruitPeriod shorthand for soft fruit: stewed currants, raspberries, gooseberries and the like. Use the cup of fruit the recipe calls for, cooked with sugar and not too wet, and fold it in off the heat.
- Setting and servingRinse a bowl or mould with cold water before filling, and chill until properly set; it will turn out if the soak was concentrated enough. Serve with cold cream poured over at the table.
- SweeteningAn overnight stand may leave the oat liquid faintly sour, which is part of the character. 'Sugar to taste' is the recipe's only guide, so sweeten by tasting the warm mixture.
Flummery takes its name from the Welsh llymru, an oat-starch jelly made from the liquor of soaked or soured oatmeal, which entered English in the seventeenth century. Its Irish and Scottish cousin is sowans (sowens), made from the starchy water pressed off oat husks and traditionally eaten at Hallowe'en and around Christmas, which is presumably why the compiler of this calendar cookbook parked it on October 31. By the nineteenth century English cookbooks had largely stolen the word for a moulded almond-and-cream blancmange with no oats in it at all, and the older grain version survived mainly in Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. The dish also gave English a useful insult: "flummery" came to mean empty flattery, a shift often said to follow from the dish's bland and insubstantial character.