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Frumenty
To a quarter of a pint of wheat that has been boiled tender in milk, but not pulped, add a quart of new milk or cream, a piece of cinnamon, equal quantities of sugar and well-washed currants--three ounces of each--and boil for fifteen minutes longer. Take the mixture off the fire, and stir in (if only milk be used) the beaten yolks of three eggs and a glass of brandy; send to table in a junket bowl, to be served in cups. If cream is used, the eggs will not be required. Time to boil wheat, from three to four hours. Probable cost, 1s.
A medieval survival dressed up for the Victorian table. The whole dish hinges on the wheat being cooked long enough to burst and go creamy before anything else is added.
- The wheatWhole wheat berries, sold now as wheat berries or whole grain spelt; hulled rather than pearled grain gives the proper texture. "Not pulped" means the grains should still hold their shape while being soft enough to crush against the roof of the mouth.
- Three to four hoursThat figure presumably assumes unsoaked grain on a slow range. An overnight soak should cut it considerably, and a pressure cooker more so again. Note that the recipe boils the wheat in milk from the outset, so it wants a bare simmer and watching to keep it from catching.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup of dry wheat, which will swell to three times that. The quart is an imperial quart, 40 fl oz or 5 US cups. Three ounces each of sugar and currants is roughly 6 tablespoons and just over half a cup.
- New milkFresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Ordinary full-fat milk stands in directly; the recipe's alternative of cream means single or light cream, not the whipping cream sold under that name today.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Nineteenth-century dried fruit arrived gritty with sand and stalk, hence "well-washed"; modern packets need only a rinse, or a soak in a little of the warm milk to plump them.
- The eggsTake the pan properly off the heat and slacken the yolks with a ladleful of the hot milk before stirring them back in, or they will scramble in the pan. The residual heat thickens them without further cooking. With cream the mixture is rich enough to need no eggs at all.
- BrandyA "glass" here is a wine glass of the period, about 2 fl oz. Stir it in with the eggs, off the heat, so it does not boil away.
- Serving and yieldA junket bowl is simply the bowl used for serving junket; any suitable deep dish will do, and the frumenty is ladled into cups at table, as the recipe directs. This quantity would serve about four to six depending on how substantial a part of the meal it is.
Frumenty takes its name from the Latin frumentum, grain, and it is among the earliest English dishes recorded, appearing in fourteenth-century manuscript cookery as an accompaniment to venison and porpoise as well as a dish in its own right. For centuries it was made from "creed" wheat, grain that had been soaked and simmered until it burst, sold ready-creed in northern English markets in the weeks before Christmas; in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire it was associated with Christmas Eve and with mumming and sheep-shearing suppers, and versions of it persisted in country districts into the twentieth century. What Cassell's prints is the polite Victorian descendant: the same boiled wheat, but enriched with cream, egg yolks, currants, cinnamon and brandy, and sent up in cups as a sweet rather than eaten as a labourer's breakfast.