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Somersetshire Frumenty
The frumenty may be served hot or cold. Bruise a quart of wheat thoroughly, put it into a stone jar, pour a quart of water upon it, and bake in a gentle oven till it is soft. Put a quart of new milk into a bowl, and pulp into it as much wheat as will make it of the consistency of very thick cream. Stir into it sugar and nutmeg to sweeten and flavour it pleasantly, and add two table-spoonfuls of picked currants. Stir the mixture over the fire till the currants are soft. Remove it from the fire, and add the yolks of two eggs beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of milk, then stir it again over the fire for a few minutes, but do not let it boil. Serve in a deep dish. Time to bake the wheat, about four hours.
A medieval survival still being printed in the 1870s: cracked wheat baked slowly to a jelly, then finished as a milk custard. The whole dish stands or falls on the last step, where the egg yolks go in.
- Do not let the custard boilOnce the yolks are added the mixture must be held below a simmer, stirred constantly, until it thickens slightly. Boiling curdles it into grainy wheat and scrambled egg, and there is no recovering it.
- "Bruise a quart of wheat"This means whole wheat berries crushed or cracked, not flour and not modern bulgur. Cracked wheat sold for pilafs is the closest thing; give it a few pulses in a food processor if it is still whole. A quart of wheat weighs somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 2 lb, depending on whether the quart is American or imperial.
- Cassell's is a British bookIts quart is 40 fl oz, not the American 32. If you are working in US cups, scale the wheat, water and milk together and the proportions still hold.
- "A gentle oven"Probably somewhere around 275-300F, though the equivalence is only approximate. Four hours at that heat softens the grain into a thick, sticky mass without drying it; the recipe does not say to cover the stone jar, but covering it will stop the water simply evaporating.
- "Pulp into it"Press the cooked wheat through a coarse sieve into the milk, adding it gradually until the mixture is the thickness of heavy cream. You will not need all of it, and the leftover pulp keeps a few days in the refrigerator.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the cow in the original sense. Use whole milk; skim gives a thin, chalky frumenty.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Picked" means gone over for stems and grit, which packaged fruit no longer requires.
- Yield and servingThe finished bowl serves four to six as a pudding. Served cold it sets noticeably firmer, and a little extra nutmeg grated over the top at the table suits it.
Frumenty takes its name from the Latin frumentum, grain, and it is one of the oldest dishes in English cookery, appearing in medieval manuscripts as a pottage of hulled wheat boiled in milk or broth, sometimes coloured with saffron and served alongside venison or porpoise at grand tables. By the nineteenth century it had retreated from the banquet to the countryside, where it survived as a sweetened harvest and Christmas dish in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the West Country; the Somerset version recorded here, enriched with egg yolks and currants, is essentially a farmhouse custard built on grain rather than a fashionable pudding. It stands as an object lesson in what long, slow, gentle heat does to whole grain.