Grenée Fourmentée

The Source

“Pour faire une grenee fourmentee mettez du ble cuire a mort, puis coulez l’esve hors nettement et laissiez reffroider; puis ayez ait de vache novellement trait et le mettez boullir en un noef pot; et quant il es sur le point de fremir, jettez vostre fourmentee dedens petit a petis en remuant dilligamment; et quant tout est ens, tirez le pot arriere du feu; puis ayez moyeulx d’oes bien batus, et passé parmy l’estamine; faictez boullir tout ensamble tanqu’il soit si espés que le louce se puist tenir droit out moillon; puis le tirez arrier du feu et jettez dedens bure et sel egaiment; et qu’il soit de belle couleur. Pour faire .xx. escuelle de grenee formentee, fault un qutron d’oes; item, de garingale, de macis, de cloux, de gigembre, de saffron, de nois muscades, de silion, de poivre et sourmetaine – de chascune une once; item, une livre de chuqure, une livre d’amigdum, et demie livre de bure.”

“To make a Wheaten Gravy. Set some wheat to boil until it bursts [no more water is taken up], drain the water off from it and let it cool. Then get freshly drawn cow’s milk and set it to boil in a new pot; when it is just about to bubble, throw your wheat into it little by little, stirring attentively. When it is all in, draw your pot back off the fire. Then get well beaten egg yolks with their threads cleanly removed, with saffron and good starch, all this strained, boil everything together until it is so thick that the spoon can stand up in the middle of it. Then pull it back off the fire. Add butter and salt judiciously. It should be of a fine color. To make 20 bowls of wheaten gravy, you need: twenty five egg [yolks], one ounce each of galingale, mace, cloves, ginger, saffron, nutmeg, chervil, pepper and laserwort, one pound of sugar, one pound of starch, and one half pound butter.”

Discussion

Frumenty of various sorts is common across the medieval corpus. In 14th- and 15th-century France alone, Chiquart mentions it, Le Menagier and Taillevent give recipes, Le Viandier gives one. They are all wheat-based (sometimes barley), thickened with eggs, and described as too thick to run on the plate. Both the Menagier’s and the Viandier’s recipes are surprisingly detailed by the standards of medieval cookbook writing.

What makes Le Vivendier’s frumenty unique is the use of wheat starch (amigdum) as well as eggs as thickener. Wheat starch shows up in other medieval recipes as a thickener for almond milk, but this is the only recipe I’ve found that combines the characteristics of an amydon or blancmanger with a frumenty. The result is a denser, more pudding-like dish than the standard egg-thickened frumenty.

The other unusual feature of this recipe is that the spice quantities are given explicitly — one ounce each of nine different spices — even though the amounts of grain and liquid are not. There are reasons to believe the proportions I used in the redaction are close to what the Vivendier author would have used. He specifies “bowls” of frumenty, and a “bowl” in this context usually refers to a serving dish shared between diners — John Russell’s Boke of Nurture sets out the conventions: kings and princes get a mes to themselves, dukes and earls share two to a mes, knights and barons three or four, and lower ranks four. The 1¼ cups of dried wheat per serving I scaled to is the most four diners would plausibly want of this dish in the context of a multi-course medieval meal. Since both eggs and starch are explicitly quantified, the liquid that can be brought to “spoon stands up in the middle” thickness is determined by ratio.

The spices, however, were too much by modern taste. Assuming my weight-to-volume conversion is correct (using information from a single spice manufacturer’s published densities), the dish came out distinctly overspiced — one of my testers compared it to eating eggnog. There are two plausible explanations: modern industrial spices may be substantially stronger than period spices ground fresh, or my volumetric assumption may have been off. A scale would have produced more accurate measurements but wasn’t available at the time. If I were redoing the redaction, I’d halve the spice quantities and adjust upward only if the dish read as underspiced.

A few other notes:

• Both dried wheat and wheat starch are easy to find at Asian markets.
• Sourmentaine is identified by Scully as Laserpitium siler, or laserwort — a distant relative of fennel and giant carrot. I couldn’t source it, so I substituted sage and parsley, splitting the one-ounce allocation between them.
• The starch in the recipe is what gives the dish its body and texture; without it, you have a heavily-spiced wheat-and-egg porridge rather than a pudding.

Bibliography