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The Wholesome Parkin
1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful melted Crisco 2 cupfuls fine oatmeal 3/4 cupful molasses 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/4 teaspoonful powdered allspice 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda Melt Crisco and mix with molasses, then add sugar, egg well beaten, salt, soda, spices, flour, and oatmeal. Mix and pour into small square Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven thirty-five minutes. This little cake is excellent when a week old.
Sufficient for one small cake.
A Crisco-era version of Yorkshire parkin, written for a cook who owned one square tin and no thermometer. Two details decide whether it works: the grade of oatmeal and the resting time.
- Fine oatmeal, not rolled oats"Fine oatmeal" means finely ground oat meal, closer to a coarse flour than to flakes. Rolled oats give a loose, chewy bar rather than the dense, faintly gritty crumb parkin should have; pinhead or steel-cut oats are too coarse. Medium or fine oatmeal, or rolled oats pulsed to a meal in a processor, is the right texture.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, measured melted as directed. Butter gives better flavour but a slightly firmer cake. "Criscoed tin" simply means greased.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F, though period usage for "moderate" runs as high as 375F. At 35 minutes the top should be set and dry with a slight crack; a skewer will come out with a few moist crumbs, which is correct — parkin baked to a clean skewer will be dry.
- Tin sizeA "small square tin" was probably something in the region of 7 or 8 inches. An 8-inch square pan holds this batter at about an inch deep and suits the stated time; a smaller or deeper tin will need longer at the same temperature.
- Molasses versus treacleEnglish parkin uses black treacle, or treacle with golden syrup. Unsulphured molasses is the closest American equivalent; blackstrap is too bitter and too dry for the quantity given here.
- The batter is stiffThere is no milk or water in the list, so expect a thick, sticky mass rather than a pourable batter. Spread it into the corners with a spatula.
- Let it ageThe line about being excellent at a week old is the point of the recipe, not an aside. Wrapped airtight, the oatmeal takes up moisture from the molasses and the crumb turns sticky and dense. Cut on the day of baking it will taste raw-edged and crumbly; the week the recipe asks for is worth giving it.
- YieldAn 8-inch square cuts into 9 or 16 squares. Parkin is served in small pieces, plain or with a sharp cheese.
Parkin is the oatmeal gingerbread of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where oats grew well and wheat did not, and it belongs above all to early November it is the traditional cake of Bonfire Night, sold at fairs alongside toffee and roast potatoes. The name is generally traced to a surname or nickname rather than to any ingredient, and the spelling wanders through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records as parkin, perkin and parken. What makes this printing interesting is its context: it appears in an American cookbook built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and books of that kind often seem to have been published to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in for butter, lard or suet in established recipes. A regional British cake made with molasses and vegetable shortening, labelled "wholesome," is a small record of how aggressively that product was promoted. The instruction to keep it a week fits the older tradition, in which parkin was commonly made in advance and improved in the tin.