Making Yorkshire Parkin: When You Want to Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November (but you forgot)
I bought Lyleās Golden Syrup on a whim in our international grocers months ago, nestled between the Marmite and jarred clotted cream. I didnāt know what golden syrup tasted like, I had no use for it, and no recipe I had ever read included it. Naturally, I bought it immediately. Walking by the racks of Japanese candy and multiple incidences of ramen noodles, I asked myself, āIs there a particular reason Iām buying this, or am I just pissed they donāt have Walkerās and donāt want to walk away empty-handed?āĀ
Months later, I end up watching a video on parkin. Uses golden syrup. In this moment, the stars align.Ā
How did I stumble on this? Well, Iām interested in historical food, and even more so historical baking, and November was coming up. Try the Guy Fawkes day cake, it proclaimed to me, and as I watched it, and it was described to me as an English gingerbread-style cake, i thought, āThereās nothing about that idea I donāt like! I can make parkin, it canāt be that hard. Not like iām going to be able to buy it here to try it.āĀ
And hard is not the word for it. Letās go on a journey.Ā
So the first thing is, that Yorkshire parkin isnāt the only parkin in town and so, as I glanced at recipes, i discovered that there were multiple theories of the business, and many of these theories involved insulting each othersā grandmothers. Lancashire parkin uses mainly golden syrup, resulting in a sweeter and softer-flavored cake, and I guess thatās why the only things a civilized human being knows about Lancashire is that itās in the North of England, and it features in the Merrily Song from the Wind and the Willows. No, the more I read, the more I realized I wanted Yorkshire parkin, a dark, aggressive form of the cake that makes heavy use of black treacle and threatens to kick your teeth in. Itās no wonder that Yorkshire gets all the great wonders of the North, like Wuthering Heights, The Secret Garden, and that one pizza place I really liked.Ā
It turns out that Yorkshire parkin uses a very small amont of golden syrup, and so you may be saying to yourself at this point, āDoc are you unnecessarily complicating your life to say you literally opened this stupid plastic bottle of sugar syrup?ā to which I say, āNo one asked you, okay?āĀ
Black treacle is the first thing on this list, and this was actually the easy part. One of the āfunā things about reading recipes from English to English (and sometimes even to English!) is that you have to make substitutions, and peopleās attitude toward substitutions for ingredients run the gamut from questionable to hysteria. The good news is that this unites us all, and I am sure there will be several fine Brits yelling at me that unsulfured molasses is nothing like black treacle, in the same way that many Americans lost their mind at the mere suggestion that a digestive might be more or less equivalent to a graham cracker. I welcome your hatemail, Hail Satan , Lord of Spiders, just use unsulfured molasses and youāll be fine.Ā
But then we have the problem of āmedium oatmeal.ā The Brits are running on a completely different system than we are with our paltry three or so styles of oatmeal: Rolled, steel cut (often called Irish oats), and instant. There are some outliers, but they are mostly the exclusive purview of places where one might buy free-range ostrich farts and consensually squeezed oranges. Meanwhile, on a rainy rock in the North, we have seventeen separate grades of oatmeal, some of which are only found on one specific moor where young maidens cry over it, keening into the wind (An expensive delicacy not unlike kopi luwak) Try as I might, I found it near impossible to get medium oatmeal, and so I took the most reasonable out possible: Buying steel cut oats and frantically googling photos of medium oatmeal until I had processed it down to the rough appearance.Ā
This is medium oatmeal. Probably.Ā
The assembly of it is stunningly old-fashioned, and Iām not making a joke when I say it seems basically unchanged from the 1700s: You mix the sugar and butter ingredients together in a sauce pan until the sugar melts, and then throw it into the dry mix, putting it together and then throwing in an egg as some desperate attempt to give so loft to what is going to be a doorstop or perhaps the blunt object that was originally used to kill Guy Fawkes, as well as a splash of milk, though what it hopes to contribute to the action I canāt possibly imagine.Ā
Having read over all this at 9:30 pm on the 5th of November, I ready myrself to assemble the parkin so I can leave it out for King James or whatever. Then I read the cook time on the cake: Seventy to Ninety Minutes.Ā
āFuck this shit, Iām American,ā I said, cracking open a beer and heading upstairs with my sixteen guns while eagles cried and sang āGod Bless The USAā overhead.Ā
REMEMBER, REMEMBER, THE SIXTH OF NOVEMBER, WHEN ALL THESE INGREDIENTS ARE STILL SITTING IN MY KITCHEN.Ā
So, I have followed the recipe. The cake is in the oven. What will it become? Stay tuned!
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
