[Sca-cooks] Frumenty/Pottage recipes

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Volker Bach wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I've fallen in love with bulgur lately and have
> already tried out a number of very nice
> combinations (try it with thinly sliced pork,
> onions and green beans, boiled in broth and
> seasoned with salt, pepper and mace - heavenly).
> Anyways, I am under the impression that grain
> (including wheat) frumenties and pottages with
> various ingredients were period staples, but I
> have yet to find an actual period recipe for a
> meal dish (including meat or fish and vegetables)
> rather than a side dish (which is in Diversa
> Servisioa and redacted in Pleyn Delit). Anybody
> know of one?


A very basic, standard method of doing frumenty (probably the side dish you speak of, but the manner of service blurs the distinction just a bit) would be to soak your wheat kernels, cook them until they begin to burst and thicken the remaining liquid. (At some point you may have switched from water to milk or almond milk or, in some cases, broth.) Common additions would include saffron and egg yolks to enrich and thicken further: the eggs are added when the dish is almost thick enough, as this is supposed, usually, to be what is known as a standing pottage -- basically it will hold peaks like stiff-beaten egg whites, or hold up a spoon, etc. There is at least one variant that uses barley instead of wheat, but what seems to come closest to the dish you're describing would be one or the other of the enriched rice dishes, usually cooked in broth with a bit oif the unskimmed fat from cooking meat, with added saffron. And then, of course, you have all the blancmanger variants, in
 which rice is cooked in almond milk made from chicken or capon broth, with the shredded poultry meat stirred in. Usually garnished with a dusting of sugar or perhaps fried almonds. I'm not aware of the kind of complex grain dish you describe, though, unless perhaps there's a Russian kasha pilaf type of thingy (similar to the modern version on the back of the Woolf's Kasha box) in period. This would probably be due to the same type of thinking that makes mixed meat-and-vegetable stews a relative rarity in most medieval cuisines.


Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

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