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Parkin, Oldham
Mix together in a bowl three and a half pounds of flour and two pounds of oatmeal. Rub into this two pounds of butter, and add two pounds of sugar, two ounces of ginger, one ounce of ground mace, six ounces of candied lemon, finely chopped, a small nutmeg, grated, and a table-spoonful of carbonate of soda. Mix thoroughly. Warm three and a half pounds of treacle slightly; stir a gill of cream into it, and add the dry ingredients. Leave the mixture to stand all night. Put it into a well-buttered tin, let it rise before the fire for a while, then bake in a moderate oven. This parkin will improve with keeping for three or four weeks.
PARLIAMENT OR "PARLEY" CAKES.
Put two ounces of fresh butter into an earthen jar with one pound of best treacle, and place the jar near the fire until the butter is dissolved. Pour the warmed liquid upon one pound of flour, add a table-spoonful of powdered ginger, a piece of pearlash the size of a nut, and a little alum; beat the mixture until it is smooth, then put it in a cool place until the next day. Roll it out thin, cut it into oblong squares, and bake these on a buttered tin in a moderate oven. Time to bake, from twenty minutes to half an hour. Probable cost, about 8d, for this quantity.
Two related gingerbreads: a huge Lancashire parkin and the thin treacle snaps called parliament cakes. The parkin quantities are for a household or a shop, and the overnight rest is not optional.
- Scale of the batchThe parkin uses about 10 lb of dry ingredients and 3.5 lb of treacle, giving something like 6 kg of dough. Quartering it produces a still-generous cake: roughly 14 oz flour, 8 oz oatmeal, 8 oz butter, 8 oz sugar, 14 oz treacle, 2 1/2 tbsp cream, and the spices and soda scaled to match.
- TreacleBritish black treacle, not golden syrup. Unsulphured molasses is the closest widely available substitute; blackstrap is harsher and will dominate the spices.
- OatmealThis means medium or coarse oatmeal, not rolled oats. Rolled oats will work but give a softer, less gritty crumb than the traditional Oldham texture.
- Carbonate of soda and pearlashCarbonate of soda is bicarbonate of soda, plain baking soda. Pearlash is potassium carbonate, still sold for German Lebkuchen; a piece "the size of a nut" is perhaps a teaspoon or two. The alum in the parliament cakes was a common cheap baking additive of the period and serves no purpose here; omit it.
- SpicingTwo ounces of ginger and one of mace across the full batch is bold but not unreasonable for a keeping cake. Both lose potency quickly once ground, so use fresh stock or the flavour will fade rather than mature.
- "Let it rise before the fire"There is no yeast. The warming simply loosens the stiff, cold, treacle-heavy dough so it settles into the tin and the soda begins to work; twenty minutes at room temperature does the same job.
- Oven and timing"Moderate" is not defined in the book; it is usually read as somewhere around 325 to 350F. A deep parkin in a lined tin needs 45 to 60 minutes and is done when the centre is just set; it should stay sticky. The parliament cakes, rolled thin, will likely need less than the stated twenty to thirty minutes at that heat: watch from ten minutes and pull them when the edges firm, as they crisp on cooling.
- KeepingThe claim about three or four weeks is accurate and the point of the recipe. Wrap the cooled parkin closely and store it in a tin; the treacle draws moisture and the crumb turns dense and sticky. Cut it in squares only when serving.
Parkin is the oatmeal gingerbread of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and its association with early November — Bonfire Night, and before that the older autumn feasts — is long attested; "Parkin Sunday" was recorded as a name for the Sunday nearest the fifth of November in parts of the north. Naming it for Oldham, as the book does here, sits alongside other town-named versions, a nineteenth-century cookery dictionary aimed at a national readership collecting them as regional variants rather than one recipe. The parliament cakes that follow are the thin, brittle treacle snaps sold at fairs and by street vendors; the origin of the name is not settled, and "parley" is usually taken as the worn-down spoken form. The recipe's estimate of eightpence covers a pound of treacle, a pound of flour and two ounces of butter — a snapshot of what plain sweet baking cost.