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Wheat, with Fruit, or Durham Pudding
Take as much wheat as may be required, wash it well, then put it into a jar, and cover with cold water; leave it to soak for twelve hours, add a little salt, then bake it in a very slow oven until perfectly tender and of the consistency of ordinary porridge. This may take from four to six hours. Then put it into saucers, hollow it in the middle, and fill it with any fruit that may be in season. The fruit should be stewed and well sweetened, as no sugar is put in the wheat. Put a spoonful of cream on top and serve.
This is whole wheat berries baked to porridge, and the only real difficulty is sourcing the grain and giving it the long, low heat it needs.
- The grain"Wheat" here means whole wheat berries (wheat kernels), sold as wheat berries or grano; do not substitute cracked wheat or bulgur, which collapse long before six hours. Hard wheat holds its shape better, soft wheat goes creamier.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. Wheat berries roughly double to triple in volume, so allow about 1/2 cup dry grain per two servings; the recipe says only to cover with cold water, so use enough to keep the grain submerged.
- A very slow ovenAround 250-275F. Anything hotter drives off the water before the starch gelatinises and you get chewy grain in a scorched dish. Check the water level once or twice and top up with boiling water.
- The soak mattersTwelve hours of cold soaking is what makes four to six hours in the oven enough. Skipping it can add hours, and the grains split unevenly.
- Salt timingSalt is added after soaking rather than before, so the seasoning goes into the baking water rather than the soak. The recipe gives no reason for the order.
- The jarPresumably a stoneware or earthenware jar; a covered casserole or bean pot stands in. The recipe does not specify a lid, but covering helps at this length of baking, as an open dish loses a good deal of water.
- SaucersProbably small shallow dishes rather than teacup saucers, though the text does not say. Any ramekin or shallow bowl works — the point is a wide, low surface you can hollow out for the fruit.
- Fruit and sweeteningAll the sugar lives in the stewed fruit, so sweeten it more assertively than you would for a pie filling. Damsons, plums, rhubarb stalks, gooseberries and apples all suit the plain grain.
Baked whole wheat with fruit and cream sits close to the long English tradition of frumenty — wheat berries simmered or baked soft, in earlier centuries with milk, egg yolks and spice, and associated with Christmas, Mothering Sunday and harvest suppers in the north of England. The northern counties held onto it longest, which may be why Durham's name is attached to this version; frumenty was still sold at Yorkshire fairs into the nineteenth century. What is striking about this entry is how thoroughly it has been demilked and de-spiced: what survives is the underlying method, a grain given many hours of very low heat in a covered jar — the sort of dish a banked-down range or the falling heat of a bread oven would suit. The absence of sugar in the wheat itself, with all the sweetness carried by seasonal stewed fruit, suggests an economical family pudding rather than a company dish.