Tracing A Food Lineage

With an emphasis on ancestral food culture and "The Perfect Diet" todays post will visit a bit of obscure family food history on my mother's side of the family.

My ancestors on my mother's side of the family hail from Wales and England.  Is it any wonder that I remember my grandparents fondness for fruitcake and custards, and roast leg of lamb?  I certainly wish someone had written down the recipes!  One of the things that the early immigrants and settlers, my ancestors among them, brought with them to this country was their native food culture which they transplanted, as best they could, in the new world, and in the case of my maternal ancestors, who are the subject of today's post, in the arid rocky mountain west.

My great grandfather was a dry farmer.  I don't think that means he did not drink, though he did not, I believe that means he prayed for rain, which, indeed, I am certain that he did!  He and my great grandmother managed to raise a family of eight children together in one of the isolated and lonely valleys of the rocky mountain west.

My grandmother, Mimi, the eldest child, remembers baking eight wheaten loaves of bread each day in a wood burning stove.  I am certain they would be considered poor by todays standard and when times were particularly tough I am told that my great grandparents fed their eight hungry children a dish, known in the food annals of the pioneer west, as Lumpy Dick.  From what I can surmise from my grandmother's rich, and possibly embroidered, descriptions of it, with her Welch love of story telling, along with what I have gathered on the internet (see recipe below) - Lumpy Dick appears to be a sort of hasty pudding, as it were, and if we were to "leap the pond," so to speak, and re-visit their native food culture, Lumpy Dick may very well be a derivative or close relation to a traditional English dish called Spotted Dick.

If you trace the lineage of Lumpy Dick even further, it is my conjecture that it finds its origins in an old relic of medieval cuisine called "frumenty." Frumenty (sometimes frumentee, furmity, fromity, fermenty) was essentially a nourishing pottage made from boiled, cracked wheat that was cooked with milk, eggs, or broth and sometimes contained currants and sugar.

I will go even further in my conjecture, to speculate, with my avid interest in all things fermented, that frumenty, may originally have been a naturally fermented sour porridge.  See notes below.

Those of you who remember Thomas Hardy's novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge" will remember well the notorious dish of furmity served with a slug of rum and the catastrophic circumstance that one dish of furmity set in motion.

Here is a benign and harmless recipe for Lumpy Dick that I found on an internet search and which may or may not be similar to the dish my grandmother ate.

Lumpy Dick

1 egg

2 1/2 c. milk

3/4 c. flour

salt

sugar, honey, or molasses

Heat 1 1/2 c. milk just to a boil.  Break egg into flour.  Stir with a fork until lumpy.  Add enough milk so that it can be poured, lumps and all.  Salt to taste as desired.  Pour the lumpy mixture into the milk heated just to boiling and cook for 15 minutes. Serve in soup dishes with the rest of the milk poured over it and sugar, molasses or honey to sweeten.

TRADITIONALLY PREPARED GRAINS

When grains are traditionally prepared and allowed to naturally sour or ferment the anti-nutrient factors, such as phytic acid, that are present in the grain and place a tremendous burden on the pancreas, are neutralized and nutrients become more bio-available.  For more information on the importance of the proper preparation of grain and grain products I refer you to Sally Fallon's marvelous article "Be Kind To Your Grains..."