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Yorkshire Parkin
1 pound coarse oatmeal ½ pound lard ½ pound cooking sugar 2 teaspoons mixed spice 1 pound Five Roses flour 1 pound molasses 2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 teaspoon baking powder Juice of 1 lemon 3 eggs Milk to stiffen.
Mix well and bake in a slow oven in dripping tin.
A traditional Yorkshire oatmeal gingerbread, given in the terse style of a contributed recipe: everything by the pound, no pan size, no baking time. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- Slow ovenBake at 300F. Parkin is dense and heavy with molasses, and a hotter oven will set and scorch the sugary crust long before the centre cooks.
- Dripping tinThe roasting pan from under a joint of meat — a shallow rectangular tin, roughly 10 by 15 inches. Grease it well and line the base with parchment; molasses batters stick hard.
- Coarse oatmealPinhead or steel-cut oats, not rolled oats and not oat flour. The gritty, slightly chewy texture is the whole point of parkin; rolled oats collapse into softness.
- Cooking sugarProbably a coarser, less-refined yellow or soft brown sugar rather than fine white. Dark brown sugar or demerara is a reasonable stand-in.
- MolassesA pound is about 1 1/3 cups. In Yorkshire this would have been black treacle; unsulphured cooking molasses is the closest supermarket equivalent. Blackstrap is harsher than intended.
- Mixed spiceThe British blend: mostly cinnamon and nutmeg with allspice, coriander and clove. Two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice will do, on top of the ginger already called for.
- Milk to stiffenAn odd phrase, since milk loosens rather than stiffens. Read it as milk to bring the very dry oatmeal-and-flour mixture to a thick, spoonable batter — start with about 1/2 cup and stop as soon as it drops heavily from the spoon.
- Timing and yieldExpect 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours; a skewer should come out with moist crumbs, not batter. The full quantity is large -- close to 5 lb of batter, cutting into 24 or more squares.
- Keep it before you cut itParkin is wrapped and left three days to a week. It starts out crumbly and dryish and turns sticky and moist as the molasses draws moisture through the oatmeal.
Parkin is the oatmeal gingerbread of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where oats were the everyday grain long after wheat had taken over in the south, and treacle and ginger were cheap grocer's goods by the nineteenth century. The name is generally traced to a surname or a dialect word rather than to any inventor, and its firmest association is with Bonfire Night on 5 November, when it is still sold and eaten in the north of England. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book -- a promotional collection issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives -- is a piece of ordinary emigration history.