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Parliaments
2 lbs. (3 cups) molasses 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter 2 lbs. (8 cups) flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 2 tablespoonfuls powdered ginger 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put the molasses into a saucepan, bring to boiling point, then add the butter, and pour the mixture upon the flour mixed with the baking powder, ginger and salt. Work the dough well with the hand until quite smooth, and let it stand a day and a night; then roll out very thin, and cut into oblong shapes. Lay the cakes on a buttered tin and bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes.
Parliaments are a species of gingerbread, sold in small, thin, hard cakes. Parliament was consumed by Thackeray's Georgy Osborne. This delicacy is referred to in company with lollipops in the "Rejected Addresses":
Roll, roll thy hoop, and twirl thy tops, And buy, to glad thy smiling chops, Crisp parliament and lollipops, And fingers of the lady.
A stiff, dry gingerbread built on a hot molasses-and-butter scald rather than creamed sugar. The hinge is the overnight rest: the dough must relax before it can be rolled thin enough to bake crisp.
- Go by weight, not cupsThe cup figures work out to a four-ounce cup of soft flour and a heavy cup of molasses. Weigh: 900 g flour, 900 g molasses, 115 g butter. Modern cup measures run heavier for both flour and molasses, so the balance can shift either way; the weights are the safer guide.
- Molasses, not blackstrapThe original intends what a British book would call treacle: a mild, dark, unsulphured cane syrup. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral, and its higher acidity will react harder with the baking powder.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. Ten minutes is right only if the sheets are rolled genuinely thin, well under 1/8 inch; thicker cakes need longer and will stay chewy rather than snapping.
- The day-and-a-night restNot optional. The scalded dough is unworkably tough straight off the hook, and the rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten slacken so it rolls without springing back. Cover it well at cool room temperature.
- Leavening is almost nominalOne teaspoon of baking powder to two pounds of flour is a whisper, and it is meant to be. These are supposed to be hard, flat biscuits, not risen gingerbread.
- Buttered tinA modern approach is parchment on a heavy sheet. Molasses at this proportion scorches on a thin dark pan; the sugar catches before the centre is set.
- Yield and keepingThis is a bakery-scale batch, roughly 100 to 120 small oblongs. Halve or quarter it for a home kitchen. Once fully crisp they keep for weeks in a tin and soften if left out in damp air.
Parliament cakes, or parlies, are thin, hard, dark gingerbread biscuits long associated with Edinburgh, where they were sold by street hawkers and by shopkeepers near the old Parliament House; the name is generally traced to the members and lawyers said to have eaten them, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Walter Scott is often said to mention them among the wares of an Edinburgh vintner's shop, and they seem also to have been known further south as a penny sweet for children, which is the sense in which the compiler quotes them here. Thackeray gives "parliament" to little Georgy Osborne in Vanity Fair, and the verse quoted comes from Rejected Addresses (1812), the parody collection by James and Horace Smith, where parliament sits alongside lollipops and lady's fingers as the small change of a child's pocket money. The recipe itself belongs to an older school of gingerbread: no eggs, no creamed sugar, just syrup scalded with butter and beaten into flour, a method that produces a biscuit designed to travel in a pedlar's basket and survive it.