SC - cooking frumenty for the masses

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:

> Does anyone have experience cooking barley for large numbers of people?
> We will be making frumenty outdoors, and I need to know how it bulks up
> for say, 100 bodies. Is it like rice, ie touchy but doable if you know
> how? Or is it like pasta where if you give it enough water it's fine?

I've never cooked barley in large quantities outdoors, but I do know a
few things about it. To be on the safe side, I'd say it's better to
compare it to rice than to pasta, because if you just boil it till it's
done, and then drain it, it has a tendency to become cemented together
by gravity. You also lose a certain amount of the nutritional value by
filling up your cooking water with barley tea and throwing it away, but
in the case of pearl barley it may be a moot point.

If you're going for a final product which people can neatly pigeonhole
into some prior experience, I suggest you cook it like a pilaf. To do
that, you need 6 cups of boiling liquid
per pound of barley, which equals approximately two cups, BTW. Toss the
barley in a pan with a bit of hot oil or butter, until the barley is
well coated with the oil and begins to toast a bit, and have your liquid
on the boil in a separate pot. Combine, cover, and simmer on LOW heat
for 25 -30 minutes. Depending on how much you're cooking, it may well
really want to burn before the top layer is done, so you may want to
consider cooking two or three smaller batches, and use the heaviest pots
you can get away with.

> I just fear ending up with a gloppy mess (thereby undoing all thepositive
> propaganda I've been giving out about medieval food not being brown
> gloppy messes!).

Now, this is all with the understanding that frumenty is supposed to
have a consistency  something like a risotto or rice pudding: spoonable
but cohesive; in a word, stondyng. However, I'll grant that that might
not be what you necessarily need under your current circumstances.

It just occurred to me that you might consider bulgur wheat, which is
precooked, and wheat being, so far as I know, the more standard grain
for frumenty anyway. I'm thinking that bulgur cooks very much like
Minute (Pfeh!) Rice, especially the smaller-cut varieties of bulgur. You
could essentially pour your boiling liquid over the bulgur, cover it,
and let the wheat drink up the liquid, with no possibility of burning.
Bulgur gets 2 parts liquid to one of bulgur by volume, same as rice.
Better to use too little liquid than too much; if it's too dry or hard
you can add more boiling liquid. Bulgur generally takes about 20 minutes
to "cook", and the initial coating with oil is optional. You might
consider it anyway if you're really concerned about the glop factor.

I hope this is some help to you...

G. Tacitus Adamantius