Remember remember the 5th of November.
Now most of us have actually heard this rhyme,
and usually coming from behind a Guy Fawkes mask, but most people at least outside the UK
don't know what it is we're supposed to be remembering,
and they also don't know why every November 5th in northern England it's customary to enjoy a slice of Parkin.
So today we'll be making the sticky ginger cake and explore its association with this guy,
this time on Tasting History.
So Parkin or as they'd say in Boston 'Pah-kun' is eaten during the late autumn and winter months
most often on Guy Fawkes day or bonfire night on the 5th of November,
and we'll talk a little bit about this most English of holidays but first
let us discuss what this most English of baked goods actually is.
It's kind of like a very sticky version of gingerbread that's made with oats,
and the recipes vary from place to place in England and wildly from time to time.
The earliest recipes that I could find from about the 1830s don't even involve any kind of flour other than oats,
and no kind of leavening so they were very, very dense and sticky.
Probably something like the Medieval gingerbread that I made last year.
And modern Parkin tends to be more cake-like and much less dense.
So I'm going to split the difference with a recipe from 1915 for Yorkshire Parkin from
May Byron's 'Potluck or the British Home Cookery Book.'
"Yorkshire Parkin. Half a pound of flour, half a pound of fine oatmeal, two ounces of lard, two ounces of butter, half a pound of treacle,
two ounces of sugar, one teaspoonful of ground ginger, one teaspoon full mixed spice,
1 teaspoon full baking powder, pinch of salt, a little milk.
Rub the lard and butter into the flour add all dry ingredients. Warm the treacle and add with a little milk.
Mix well. Pour into a flat tin, well greased.
Bake in a very moderate oven about 40 minutes."
So for this recipe what you'll need is: one and three quarters cup or 225 grams of cake flour or all-purpose flour.
The cake flour works best but either one works.
One and a half cups or 225 grams of fine oatmeal.
Now earlier recipes say that it should be sifted so it's actually like oat flour but more modern recipes tend to use
what's called medium oatmeal which is much finer than anything that you're going to find over here in the States.
What you don't want to use is rolled oats or are rolled oats plural?
Or, are rolled oats?
So you can take rolled oats and blitz them in a food processor to make a more medium oatmeal.
4 tablespoons or 55 grams of lard, 4 tablespoons or 55 grams of butter, 3/4 of a cup or 225 grams of treacle.
Now what exactly is treacle and what kind do we use for this recipe?
Well it's any uncrystallized syrup made during the refining of sugar
and different versions of the cake are made with different types of treacle.
Sometimes it's black treacle which is similar to molasses
and sometimes it's golden syrup which really we don't have an exact version of here in the US
but Dorothy Hartley who was a bit of the end-all and be-all when it came to the history of English food
writes not long after this recipe was written that parkin treacle was often
"the old-fashioned reddish loose treacle or equal parts of black treacle and golden syrup mixed".
So that's what I'll use and I'll put links in the description to where you can get that if you live here in the US.
1/3 cup or 60 grams of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of ginger, 1 teaspoon mixed spice.
Another thing that you're not going to find here in the US is mixed spice. It is not allspice,
two very, very different things. It is a mix of spices that varies again throughout history,
but is typically used now for making different kinds of Christmas cakes in England.
So if you want to make your own you'll need one teaspoon of allspice, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon nutmeg,
a half teaspoon of mace, a quarter teaspoon of ginger, a quarter teaspoon of cloves,
and a quarter teaspoon of coriander. Mix that all together and then take one teaspoon of that, and that is your mixed spice,
but you can also alter the the concoction in really any way that you want, it is not standard.
Two teaspoons of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of milk.
So first pour your trickle into a saucepan and heat it over low heat to warm it.
You don't want it to boil, you just want it to get hot enough so that it's much more liquidy and easier to use.
While it warms mix the flour and the oatmeal, then rub in the lard and the butter.
You want to try to lift it up out of the bowl and kind of let it flutter down as you're rubbing it in.
It adds air and is just going to give the cake a little bit more lift.
Then add in the sugar, ginger, mixed spice, baking powder and the salt, and mix it thoroughly.
Then finally pour in the treacle and the milk and mix together. It'll be a very thick batter
but you still want it relatively pourable so if it's not pourable then just add a little bit more milk.
Then put it into a lined 8 inch cake pan and smooth the top,
then set it in an oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius for 45 minutes.
Once it's baked remove it from the oven. Let it cool in the pan for about 10 minutes and then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Then you're going to cut it into squares, and then what do you do?
Well then you wait.
You wait.
So you can eat it the day that it's baked but it tends to be kind of dry
when it actually comes out of the oven but if you wait three or four days or better yet a week
it becomes soft and sticky, and that is how you're supposed to eat it.
So while we wait for the Parkin to
softify- Softify? Stickify?
While we wait for it to be what it's supposed to be
you can make sure that you're subscribed to Tasting History and hit that notification bell
and we'll still have plenty of time for me to tell you about Parkin and Guy Fawkes.
So like I said many people outside of the UK and I dare say some people inside of the UK
don't know why we're commanded to
Remember, remember the 5th of November.
Well it's all due to the failure of 13 men most notoriously this Guy,
that was his name, Guy Fawkes.
Though when he fought for the Spanish he changed it to Guido Fawkes and that's actually how he signed his name up until he died,
but in England it was Guy Fawkes and he was a Catholic and the man most associated
with the Gunpowder Plot of November 5th 1605.
It was a plot to blow up the House of Lords, one of the houses of Parliament along with
King James I, so that he could be replaced with a Catholic monarch.
But one fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment was that the Baron Monteagle a fellow Catholic
was going to be in Parliament that day and so he would also get blown up.
So one of the conspirators, still nobody knows exactly who it was, sent him an anonymous letter
warning him to stay away from Parliament that day.
For "they shall receive a terrible blow this parliament."
;) ;) *nudge nudge
Very subtle.
But he got the hint and decided to take it to the King.
The plot was uncovered and Guy Fawkes was arrested and became the face of the conspiracy
because he was actually arrested as he left the stockpile of gunpowder beneath the Parliament building.
Then he was tortured, tried and hanged but on the day that it was actually supposed to go down the 5th of November 1605
Parliament decreed that everyone should light bonfires in the city of London to celebrate
the saving of King James I.
Though in a city mostly made of wood they did warn
"This testimony of joy be careful done without any danger or disorder."
Very sensible.
And from that day forward it became a national holiday being celebrated in different ways all around England and in the north
that meant Parkin.
Now where the name of the cake came from nobody really knows.
One theory is that it comes from the old Celtic "bairgain" which was a type of old unleavened barley cake
but another theory just as plausible comes from the north Yorkshire town of Filey.
See some time ago the town was being ravaged by a giant dragon.
Stick with me, these things seem to happen in the north of England more often than you might think.
Well there was a woman named Mary Parkin who for some time had been making these sticky little ginger cakes
for her husband Ralph or as they would say "Ralph/Rafe" and
whenever he would eat them his jaws would get stuck together
until he had something to drink. So,
Mary had a bit of a think and said
hey why don't I make a giant tray full for the dragon. So she did.
Feeds these to the dragon, he loves them, gobbles them all up but then
his jaws too get stuck together so he has to go down to the sea to get a drink, and when he does
all of the other villagers jump out and they drown the dragon in the ocean.
For saving the town the cakes would forever be known as Parkin in honor of Mary and the dragon's bones would become
the rocky outcrop known as Filey Brigg.
So that's the story that I believe but one less plausible story is
that just somebody named Parkin made these little ginger cakes that everybody had been making for
many, many years and they said hey blank Parkin made these so let's just call them Parkin cakes.
Doesn't doesn't seem as as likely as the dragon story but we'll never know.
What we do know is that they've been around for quite some time with that name.
In the song of Arthur O'Bradley's wedding from around 1660 it says
"When Arthur, to make their hearts merry, brought ale, and parkin and perry."
There's also a story from 1728 which accuses a young Ann Whitaker of Yorkshire
of stealing oats to make her Parkin.
And even Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William Wordsworth,
wrote in her diary on November 6th 1800 that
It was "A very rainy morning and night I was baking bread dinner and parkins."
Also I had to record that like eight times because I really have
trouble saying the name William Wordsworth. Trying to say William moore's worth will you more it's
it's actually really, really hard.
But it wasn't just women making these cakes
as evidenced in a 1797 court case that was heard at the Yorkshire Assizes where a husband was accused of attempting to
poison his wife with a Parkin laced with arsenic.
Also the case has like the coolest name for a court case ever.
Rex vs Jagger
or Rex v. Jagger.
Rex V. Jagger, private eye.
Such a cool name and that cool name brings me back to another cool name Guy Fawkes,
but why is Parkin associated with Guy Fawkes.
Well one theory is that it's because Guy Fawkes was from York where the cake was served.
Hmmm, maybe, but doubtful. More likely it wasn't Guy that was the link at all
but the bonfires used to celebrate his failed plot.
For centuries bonfires were built during harvest celebrations,
most famously Samhain and All Hallows Eve or Halloween,
and cakes would often be made to accompany the festivities.
Well in the north of England especially in the Middle Ages that meant
Theorf or Thar cakes and those were flat little unleavened round cakes
made with honey butter and oats.
Very similar to Parkin and in fact until the early 20th century the term
Theorf cake and Parkin were often used interchangeably.
So in 1605 when the bonfires of Halloween were pushed back
a week to become the bonfires of Guy Fawkes night the cakes just kind of followed along
for as Pink Floyd said how can you have a bonfire if you don't eat your cake...
or something- something like that. >_>
So yeah the link is probably just happenstance but it's stuck.
In an article from 1857 it says
"A very old custom, coeval, apparently, with the annual bonfires and fireworks,
prevails to this day in the West Riding of Yorkshire of preparing against the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot,
a kind of oatmeal gingerbread, if I may so call it, and religiously partaking of it on the dreadful day and subsequently.
The local name of this delicacy is Parkin..."
So whether you're making your Parkin to commemorate the saving of King James I,
or to trick a dragon into foolishly drinking sea water,
just make sure you wait a few days before you enjoy it.
But once you have waited a few days it's ready to go.
And here we are Yorkshire Parkin.
So the pieces I cut were pretty big, you know it's
perfect for me, but it is definitely too big for a cat. It's about the size of a cat's head
and I only say this because last night while I was in bed trying to go to sleep I hear a shout from downstairs.
Max! It's Jaime, he's got a biscuit!
It's not a biscuit, it's the Parkin
but he had gotten up there and I had these wrapped, our cat Jaime had gotten up taken a piece this big, and
was like trying to get up the stairs with it which he did very well.
I just thought that was so funny it was like at the size of his head.
I don't know how he does that. Anyway let's give it a shot.
*Chomp
It's sticky.
Two hours later...
I could see this taking down a dragon.
It's really, really sticky. Yeah usually they say like
chew everything 30 times or whatever before swallowing. This you'd have to chew like
but to chew like a hundred times it's so sticky but
the flavor is fantastic. It's really-
it's really gingery but it's also just really other spiced and the the molasses or it's not
molasses the the treacle rather gives it like this dark warmth to the flavor.
I think that if you know if you like gingerbread cake but want something a little bit different a
little bit more exciting this is kind of the way to go it would be really good with some
something like light whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
It's really, really sticky.
It's interesting because the- it's really sticky and yet it also is kind of crumbly. It's kind of like
stickiness throughout and then some pieces are crumbly, it's kind of crazy.
I really really like it. This- this I think this will become a yearly tradition
um and there are so many different kinds there's Leeds Parkin, and then Yorkshire Parkin,
a dozen recipes for each of those and there are other types of Parkin cake,
Parkin sponge which is more cake like that each year you could try a different kind and
you know test out and see which one's your favorite.
So make sure to follow me on Twitter @tastinghistory1
and Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.