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YORKSHIRE FRUMENTY (a Christmas supper dish)
Put a pint of good wheat into a bowl, pour cold water over it, and let it soak for twelve hours or more. Cover with a plate, put it in the oven, and let it simmer gently till tender. Stir occasionally to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the dish. Take it out and let it get cold; it ought to be quite stiff. When wanted, stir about a pint of the boiled wheat into a quart of boiling milk, sweeten the mixture, and flavour with grated nutmeg or powdered cinnamon. Let it boil, serve in a soup tureen, and hand it round in soup plates. Time to simmer the wheat, about three hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A two-stage dish: the wheat is cooked and set aside, then finished in milk when wanted. The first stage is the one that goes wrong, and it is almost always undercooked grain.
- What "good wheat" meansWhole wheat berries, not flour or cracked wheat. Traditionally the Yorkshire version used pearled or hulled wheat, sold in the north as "creed wheat" in the run-up to Christmas; hard or soft wheat berries from a health-food shop are the nearest thing. Spelt or farro will work and cook faster.
- A pint of wheatMeasured by volume, not weight: an imperial pint of dry berries, roughly 2 1/2 US cups, close to a pound, which will swell to something over a quart once soaked and cooked.
- Oven temperature"Simmer gently" in a covered dish points to a slow oven; the recipe names no temperature, but around 300F answers the description. Higher and the liquid boils away before the grain softens. Keep the wheat covered by an inch of water and top up if it drinks it all.
- Three hours is a minimumUnpearled wheat berries can take four hours or more to go properly tender and burst. Test by biting one: it should be soft through with no chalky centre. A pressure cooker does it in about 45 minutes.
- Why it sets stiffStarch released during the long cooking sets as the mass cools; this is normal and is what the original means by "quite stiff." Break it up with a spoon before stirring it into the milk. Cooked wheat keeps three or four days refrigerated.
- Sweetening and flavourNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons of sugar per quart of milk suits most palates; brown sugar or a spoonful of honey is closer to the older versions. Currants, a strip of lemon peel, or a spoonful of rum or brandy stirred in at the end are all traditional additions in Yorkshire.
- The final boilOnce the wheat goes into the milk it thickens quickly and catches on the pan base. Stir continuously over medium heat and let it come to the boil only briefly, or thicken it off the direct heat in a double boiler.
- ServingServed hot and soup-thick, in soup plates, four to five people. It thickens further as it cools, so loosen with a little more hot milk if it stands.
Frumenty takes its name from the Latin frumentum, grain, and it is a dish of long standing in English cookery: hulled wheat boiled to a jelly in stock or milk appears in medieval manuscript cookery, often served alongside venison or porpoise at grand tables and made with almond milk in Lent. By the nineteenth century it had shrunk from a courtly dish to a regional and seasonal one, surviving most strongly in Yorkshire and the north, where grocers sold ready-"creed" wheat before Christmas and the finished frumenty was eaten on Christmas Eve, sometimes laced with rum. Elsewhere it attached itself to other dates in the calendar, Mothering Sunday among them. Cassell's including it at all, at a probable cost of eightpence, marks it as a cheap, filling, faintly antique thing by the 1870s, kept alive by custom rather than fashion.