People who are not from Wales have great difficulty reproducing certain Welsh consonants; as a result, the Welsh word llymru was rendered into English not only as flummery but also as Mummery, the latter most easily said after a trip to the dentist. Flummery, of course, prevailed over Mummery and from the early seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century the word referred, like the original Welsh term, to a sour jelly made by boiling oatmeal with the husks. In the mid eighteenth century, flummery also developed two new meanings: it became the name of a sweet dish made of milk, flour, and eggs, and simultaneously it came to mean empty praise or gibberish. In this, flummery underwent the reverse development of the word trifle, whose original sense was idle tale but which also came to denote a dish of sponge cake and cream.
A delicacy prepared with slightly fermented oatmeal that is boiled and commonly served with cream or milk is known as porridge. Presently, it can also refer to a flavored pudding produced using unfermented oatmeal or rice and served as a sweet course. On occasion, a fancy custard is also referred to as porridge, albeit inaccurately, as it is commonly known as frumenty.
A frigid dessert hailing from Old English cuisine is fashioned using cereal, traditionally oatmeal, set in a mold before being overturned. This dessert is known as flummery. Another variation of flummery is the Dutch Flummery, prepared using gelatin or isinglass, egg yolks, and seasonings, whereas the Spanish Flummery is made by using cream, rice flour, cinnamon, and sugar.