It’s the time of year when friends from northern England suddenly remember, remember the joys of parkin, the sticky ginger cake traditionally enjoyed around the bonfire on 5 November – and, almost as one, begin mithering on about the pains of exile to the barbarian south, a land where parkin’ costs £8 an hour.
Native to Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular, it also goes by the name “thar cake”, which, according to Laura Mason and Catherine Brown’s encyclopaedic The Taste of Britain, suggests Middle English origins, “associated with the pre-Christmas Martinmas fast, and possibly, with pagan bonfire ceremonies that took place at the end of October (later christianised into All Souls).” The modern name parkin, or perkin, possibly related to a diminutive of the name Piers, is “inexplicable but may denote affectionate disdain”.
Northerners must leave their disdain at the Watford Gap, because I’ve never met anyone with anything but very vocal affection for parkin – and after this week, I can see why. If you too feel the ache of loss every time you stand around a bonfire with a mere toffee apple in hand, or simply live outside parkin’s sphere of influence and want to know what all the fuss is about, here are your options for making your own.
Dry goods
All the parkins I try contain oatmeal; groats that have been chopped, rather than rolled like the quicker cooking porridge oats we’re more used to seeing these days. Mason and Brown’s entry on the subject informs me that wheat flour is a relatively recent, 19th-century addition to the formula, and indeed, two of the recipes (one for Lancashire parkin given to Florence White for her 1932 collection Good Things in England by a Mrs Stocks of Durham, and another from 1830 adapted from Miss Ferrand of Brockholes, Huddersfield, and collected in Peter Brears’ book Traditional Food in Yorkshire) eschew it altogether, producing parkins more like flapjacks rather than the sticky cakes generally sold under that name.
Clearly a fluffier result is more to modern tastes: in fact, looking online I note that proud Yorkshireman James Martin and the Hairy Bikers have both published parkin recipes that leave out the oatmeal altogether – a shame, because it gives the cakes their distinctive rough, chewy texture. To maximise this quality, Julie Duff’s Cakes: Regional & Traditional plumps for coarse-cut oatmeal, but the medium variety proves more popular with testers averse to picking out large pieces of oat from their teeth for the rest of the afternoon (softies), and the smaller, dustier flakes seem to bind more easily to the rest of the ingredients, while coarse oatmeal has a tendency to fall to the bottom.
Duff’s recipe also stands out for using wholemeal flour where Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England goes for plain white and Gary Rhodes opts for self-raising. Raising agents are another Victorian addition, and Duff and Hartley both stir bicarbonate of soda into their batter, which will react with the treacle to create the same effect as Rhodes’ baking powder, while the two traditional oatmeal-only versions use neither, giving them a resolutely flat, brittle consistency quite different from their younger, cakier rivals.
Testers vote overwhelmingly for the risen parkin, seeing the march of progress as a positive thing in this instance, though because – with the oats and treacle – these are never going to be featherlight affairs, we feel we can get away with using wholemeal flour for flavour without weighing down the mixture too much.
The sweetener
Although it seems probable that these were originally sweetened with molasses (otherwise known as treacle) and, before that, honey, once golden syrup came on to the market in the 1880s, it was widely substituted for at least part of the molasses. Hartley’s recipe calls for “the old-fashioned reddish ‘loose’ treacle”, recommending readers unable to source such a thing combine equal parts of golden syrup and black treacle instead, while Ferrand and Duff both go very heavy on the treacle, and Gary Rhodes’ version in New British Classics goes the opposite way, favouring the syrup instead.
According to Sybil Kapoor, who devotes an entire chapter to it in her book Simply British, molasses and British black treacle are not entirely interchangeable, the first being less sweet and more complex in flavour than the familiar stuff in the red tin, but as black treacle is far more readily available here than molasses, I’m going to stick with that, using rather more of it than syrup because the distinctive bitter, almost liquoricey character of treacle is what sets this recipe apart from mere syrup sponge. To this end, I’ll also be using Duff’s dark muscovado sugar, rather than Rhodes’ light variety: this should be a treat as dark as any November night.
The fat and liquid
Mason and Brown explain that any available fat can be used in parkin, which explains why I find recipes calling for mutton dripping and lard as well as the expected butter – and, rather unusually, we can detect very little difference. Beef dripping, which I substitute for the mutton variety, tends to lend the whiff of the Sunday roast to everything it touches, but, perhaps because of the heavy spicing in parkin, it slips under the radar here. Butter, however, seems likely to have the widest appeal (Duff even recommends spreading more on top of the warm parkins, which isn’t strictly necessary, but is of course delicious.)
Milk and eggs are common additions to parkin mixtures, though Stocks uses a large volume of water to give a very thin batter effervescent with bicarbonate of soda, which produces a very moist, voluminous result – indeed, it might be worth experimenting with her recipe using a hard vegetable fat if you’re interested in a vegan version, though testers find it lacks the intensity of flavour of some of the others.
Spicing
Often described solely as a ginger cake, many parkin recipes incorporate other spices as well, Stocks and Hartley using allspice, and Rhodes nutmeg and mixed spice, which generally includes allspice as well as cloves and cinnamon. Use whichever you happen to enjoy (regular readers will not be surprised to see I’ve gone with nutmeg), but don’t stint on the ginger.
Hartley’s recipe is the only one to include fruit and nuts in the form of candied citrus peel and almonds, which, though rarely unwelcome in a cake, don’t seem strictly necessary here. Again, if you want to add your own favourites, be my guest, just don’t blame me if you’re laughed out of Bettys Tea Room.
Method
The two oatmeal-only recipes are left overnight to thicken up, allowing them to be formed into stiff cakes the next day – useful particularly in the case of Ferrand’s thar cake, which is cooked on a very cool griddle, girdle or bakestone, depending where you are in the British Isles. Duff notes that this method yields results rather like flat, fluffy ginger drop scones and, though I’m sure that griddle cookery is an art worth mastering, it seems to me that modern audiences expect their parkin to come in thick oven-baked slabs, however historically correct slim scones might be.
(Note that parkin is one of those cakes, like malt loaf, that carries on getting better for some weeks after making, so if you enjoy these, bookmark this article to make again in mid October 2018.)
Perfect parkin
(Makes 16 slices)
120g treacle
80g golden syrup
170g butter, plus extra to grease
200g wholemeal flour
200g medium oatmeal
3 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
175g soft dark brown sugar
1/4 tsp fine salt
1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
45ml milk
Heat the oven to 140C. Weigh the treacle, syrup and butter in a medium pan and place over a medium heat until melted together, being careful not to let it boil. Take off the heat. Generously grease a 22cm square baking tin.
Combine the flour, oatmeal, spices, sugar, salt and bicarb in a large mixing bowl, then pour in the treacle mixture, stirring to combine. Beat the egg with the milk and then beat into the batter until it’s just loose enough to pour into the tin.
Bake for about an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters until it’s just firm in the centre and, when pressed, springs back. Allow to cool in the tin for at least 30 minutes, then turn out, slice and either serve warm, or store in a tin for up to three weeks; the texture will carry on improving.
Who makes the best parkin: Yorkshire, Lancashire … or somewhere else entirely? Do you like it fluffy or crunchy, bittersweet or syrupy, and warm from the girdle or sticky from the tin two weeks later? And are there other regional recipes for Bonfire Night you’d recommend for this weekend?
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