Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Hulled wheat boiled in milk and flavored with sugar and spices.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A dish made of hulled wheat boiled in milk and seasoned, especially used in England and in some of the southern United States at Christmas.
  • noun Wheat mashed for brewing.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Food made of hulled wheat boiled in milk, with sugar, plums, etc.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A porridge made by boiling hulled wheat, typically with additional ingredients such as milk, egg yolks, and/or almond milk, traditionally served with venison or porpoise. Frumenty was often the first dish on the menu of a medieval English feast.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun sweet spiced porridge made from hulled wheat

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English frumente, from Old French froumentee, from froument, grain, from Latin frūmentum.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French frumentee, from frument ("grain"), from Latin frūmentum.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word frumenty.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Boiled wheat, usually with milk, eggs, dried fruit. Occasionally strengthened with alcohol. Served with meat (cf pudding in the savoury sense) or as a farmhouse breakfast on Christmas Day, way back when in post-medieval England. Also spelled "furmenty", "formity", and other variants. An important plot component in Thomas Hardy's ''The Mayor of Casterbridge''.

    December 28, 2008

  • "They passed within twenty yards of each other on either side of the frumenty seller's striped tent, Pell and Bean heading toward the grounds of the cathedral, Joe Ridley to the nearest tavern."

    The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 38

    June 25, 2010

  • "To follow there were desserts such as frumenty, a sweet porridge of wheat boiled in milk and spices, and sugary confections of spices and dried fruits, washed down with spiced wine and ale..."

    --Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 105

    December 2, 2016

  • He's downed milk and cookies aplenty

    So after a weary descent he

    Is pleased with the treat

    Of hot milk and wheat,

    For Santa is fond of frumenty.

    December 25, 2016

  • Usage/historical note on mawmenee.

    January 8, 2017

  • "The first course of frumenty, wheat porridge with scrambled eggs often served, as here, with venison, was a standard medieval item."

    Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008), 30.

    November 27, 2017