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Lancashire Parkin
1½ pounds fine oatmeal ½ pound butter 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ pound Five Roses flour ½ pound cooking sugar 1 pound molasses. 1 egg 2 cups milk.
Dissolve the soda in the milk. Melt the butter and molasses together. Beat the egg in, and add the soda last. Mix well.
Bake in slow oven in dripping tin. (Without Eggs) No. 1 1 pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound sugar 3 ounces butter 3 ounces lard ½ 1/2 gill syrup A little milk 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda.
Roll out thin and bake 20 to 30 minutes in a moderate oven. (Without Eggs) No. 2 1¼ pounds fine oatmeal 1 ounce ground ginger 10 ounces moist sugar ½ pound Five Roses flour ½ pound syrup A little milk Warm the milk with the syrup and add enough to the dry ingredients to make a stiff paste. Pour into a greased tin, and bake slowly for about 1 hour.
FIVE ROSES is packed to suit the convenience of housewives in clean, new bags of 7 pounds, 14 pounds, 24 pounds, 49 pounds, 98 pounds; also in barrels of 196 pounds and half-barrels of 98 pounds.
Three versions of the same northern English oatmeal gingerbread, given in imperial weights with no pan size and, in the first recipe, no baking time at all. Weigh everything; parkin is a batter dominated by oatmeal and syrup, and cup measures will not serve it.
- The hinge: let it ripenParkin is traditionally not eaten the day it is baked. Wrapped in paper and stored airtight for three days to a week, the oatmeal softens and the crumb turns sticky and moist. Fresh from the oven it is drier and grittier.
- "Fine oatmeal"This means finely ground oatmeal — pinhead oats milled small, close to what is sold as fine or medium oatmeal for porridge — not rolled oats and not oat flour. Rolled oats will give a flabby, flaky texture; if that is all you have, pulse them until sandy.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven is about 300–325F, a moderate oven 350F. The first version wants the slow oven because the molasses scorches easily; no time is given at all, so test with a skewer, and expect a slab this size to want an hour or more.
- Dripping tinThe rectangular tin that sat under a roast — in a modern kitchen a rimmed roasting tin or a 9x13 baking pan. Grease and line it with paper; molasses batter welds itself to metal.
- A gillA quarter-pint: 5 fluid ounces imperial, 4 in US measure. The half gill of syrup in version No. 1 is thus about 2 to 2½ fluid ounces — a quarter cup or a little over. "Syrup" here means golden syrup or light treacle rather than the darker molasses of the first recipe.
- Sugars"Cooking sugar" is ordinary granulated. "Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, still damp with molasses; light or dark brown sugar substitutes directly.
- Soda in milkDissolving bicarbonate in the milk distributes it evenly through a heavy batter that resists mixing, and it reacts with the acid in the molasses. Add it last, as instructed, and get the tin into the oven promptly.
- Version No. 1 is a biscuitRolled thin and baked 20 to 30 minutes, that one produces crisp parkin biscuits rather than a cake. The other two are slab cakes to be cut in squares — the first mixes something like five pounds of batter, so it cuts into a great many pieces.
- GingerAn ounce of ground ginger in version No. 2 is roughly five tablespoons, which is assertive but in keeping with parkin; scale it back if you want a milder spicing.
Parkin is the oatmeal-and-treacle gingerbread of the north of England, made where oats grew better than wheat and where black treacle was cheap; it is associated above all with Yorkshire and with Bonfire Night on 5 November, though Lancashire versions like these were equally domestic. The name's origin is unsettled — it is often said to derive from a surname or from the dialect word for a small cake — and no documented etymology is secure. Its appearance in a Canadian milling company's cookbook is the point of interest: Five Roses was the flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and its recipe collection was assembled from contributions sent in by housewives across the Dominion, so British regional baking travelled into it wholesale. Three variants printed side by side, two of them eggless, reflect that crowdsourcing.