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The Wholesome Parkin
1 cupful flour ½ 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 ½ 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 Yorkshire oatmeal gingerbread rewritten for an American shortening tin. It works, but one measurement in the ingredient list is almost certainly wrong.
- The fat quantity is suspectA cup and a half of melted shortening against one cup of flour and two of oatmeal would give a greasy, unbindable batter. Traditional parkin runs closer to half a cup of fat for this amount of dry ingredient; treat the printed figure as an error rather than a target, and judge by a batter that is thick and droppable rather than pourable.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, still sold under the same name, though the modern product has been reformulated and is not the heavily hydrogenated fat of the 1910s. Melted butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly here, though butter will brown the crumb more and shorten the keeping time the recipe is proud of.
- Fine oatmealNot rolled oats. British parkin uses medium or fine oatmeal, a gritty meal ground from the groat, which gives the cake its sandy texture. Pinhead or steel-cut oats pulsed briefly in a food processor come close; rolled oats give a chewier, flatter result.
- Moderate oven350F. The recipe specifies only a "small square tin" for one small cake, so treat thirty-five minutes as a starting point; a deeper or smaller tin will need longer and should be tested with a skewer at the centre.
- MolassesAmerican molasses stands in for British black treacle or golden syrup. Use unsulphured light or full-flavour molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate the ginger.
- "Criscoed tin"Grease the tin thoroughly and line the base with parchment. Molasses batters stick hard, and this one has no creamed sugar structure to help it release.
- Soda and no other leaveningHalf a teaspoon of soda against three-quarters of a cup of molasses is a modest rise. Parkin is meant to be dense and close-grained, not cakey, so resist the urge to add baking powder.
- The week-old instructionThis is the point of the cake, not an afterthought. Wrap it tightly once cool and leave it at room temperature for up to a week; the oatmeal absorbs moisture from the molasses and the crumb turns sticky and soft. Cut into small squares to serve.
Parkin belongs to the north of England, above all to Yorkshire and Lancashire, where oats grew where wheat would not and oatmeal was the ordinary bread grain. It is firmly tied to Bonfire Night on 5 November, and older sources sometimes call the date Parkin Day; the association is traditional rather than documented in any single origin. This version appears to come from a Crisco promotional cookbook of the kind Procter & Gamble issued in the 1910s — an inference drawn from the text itself rather than from any statement in it. The instruction to grease the tin with "Criscoed" fat, and the capitalised brand name repeated in the method, are the tell that this is advertising copy as much as a recipe.