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Parkin Cakes
(England.) These are eaten on Guy Fawkes' Day. Mix 1 1/2 pounds of flour, 3/4 pound butter, 1 1/2 pounds fine oatmeal, 2 pounds brown sugar, 2 ounces of powdered ginger, 1 pint molasses, 3 teaspoonfuls of carbonate of soda, and 2 ounces butter, and a teaspoonful of vanilla or lemon. Let it stand 1 hour. Roll into thin cakes, and bake in a slow oven at least an hour. Half the recipe is sufficient for a small family.
A traditional Yorkshire parkin scaled for a Victorian household, written for cooks who already knew what the dough should feel like. A few of the instructions need translating, and one of them — the baking — needs rethinking.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is usually reckoned at somewhere between 275F and 325F (140-160C). At that heat thin rolled cakes may well be done before the hour the recipe demands, so watch them; baked the full hour they will come out crisp and biscuit-like rather than soft.
- Butter, listed twiceThe recipe calls for 3/4 pound of butter and then another 2 ounces further down, which read together is 14 ounces total. There is no separate stage for the extra 2 ounces, so add it with the rest.
- Carbonate of sodaPlain baking soda, not baking powder. Three teaspoons is right for this volume of batter — the acidity of the molasses and brown sugar is what activates it.
- Molasses and treacleAn English parkin would have used black treacle, sometimes cut with golden syrup. American molasses stands in well; avoid blackstrap, which is bitter at this proportion. A pint is 2 cups (US) or 20 fl oz if you are working from an English measure — the book is American, so read it as 2 cups.
- Fine oatmealNot rolled oats and not steel-cut. Fine or medium oatmeal is stone-ground meal, gritty rather than flaky; it is what gives parkin its sandy texture. Rolled oats blitzed briefly in a food processor are a workable substitute.
- Letting it standThe hour's rest is not idle. It lets the oatmeal absorb the molasses so the dough rolls without tearing. Skip it and the dough stays slack and sticky.
- Rolling thinThis dough is soft and sticky. Chill it after the rest, roll between sheets of parchment, and cut into squares or rounds rather than fussing with shapes.
- KeepingParkin is meant to be stored, not eaten warm. Wrapped in an airtight tin for three to five days it softens and the ginger settles. The full recipe makes a great deal — several dozen cakes at least, depending on how thin they are rolled and how large they are cut — and the note that half suffices for a small family is sound advice.
Parkin belongs to the oatmeal-growing north of England, chiefly Yorkshire and Lancashire, where oats did better than wheat and treacle was cheap once sugar refining scaled up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its link to 5 November — the anniversary of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, marked with bonfires ever since — is well established by the Victorian period, when parkin was among the foods associated with bonfire night; the earlier Yorkshire name for oatcakes of this family is tharf cake, and parkin is often said to have grown out of that older tradition. The name itself is unexplained, though it is commonly traced to the surname Parkin or Perkin. Its appearance here, in a collection gathering dishes from abroad for American cooks, is typical of the genre: the recipe is offered less as everyday baking than as a piece of national custom, tagged with the holiday that explains it.