Note 21 — March 1.] SIMNEL SUNDAY.

Furmenty, Furmity, or Frumity; still a favourite dish in the north, consisting of hulled wheat boiled in milk and seasoned. It was especially a Christmas dish. In the True Gentlewoman’s Delight, 1676, p. 17, the following receipt is given for making furmity:

Take a quart of sweet cream, two or three sprigs of mace, and a nutmeg cut in half, put it into your cream, so let it boil; then take your French barley or rice, being first washed clean in fair water three times and picked clean, then boil it in sweet milk till it be tender, then put it into your cream, and boil it well, and when it hath boiled a good while, take the yoke of six or seven eggs, beat them very well to thicken on a soft fire, boil it, and stir it, for it will quickly burn; when you think it is boiled enough sweeten it to your taste, and so serve it in with rosewater and musk-sugar, in the same manner you make it with wheat.—Nares’ Glossary (Halliwell and Wright), 1859, vol. i. p. 340.