Please, good missus, a thar cake...

Here's a fine confusion of cakes.

I have a recipe, which I was given by my thesis supervisor way back when, for Thar Cakes. He brought some spicy biscuits to one of our meetings, around this time of year, and I begged the recipe from him - and that's all I can say with any certainty.

Not that "around this time of year" is any great degree of certainty - I'm sure that the biscuits had a seasonal connection, and my memory tries to associate them with soul cakes, but while there may have been a similar tradition of going from door to door (or then again, I may have invented that bit) a quick poke around the internet confirms that soul cakes are something completely different: recipes vary (here's an example, with information about the associated traditions) but they seem to agree that soulcakes are a rich yeasted bun.

Recipes for thar cake, on the other hand, claim that it's a variant of parkin. But parkin is a thick oatmeal and treacle gingerbread as in this recipe - often baked for Bonfire Night, 5th November (so that works). (If you come from Leeds, it's called moggy, and easy on the ginger - but I digress). Ah, no, wait, it seems that the cakes may be baked on a griddle, and here's a recipe for Winksworth Thar Cakes in which the cakes are separate rounds (where's Winksworth? Google offers me Wirksworth in Derbyshire - and my recipe comes from Derbyshire).

Here we are, this is what I was looking for! Among much other fascinating information:

"The association of parkin with November derives from confusion. Parkin Sunday in West Riding areas was the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints that is any of the first seven days of November. In Lancashire Tharcake Monday was the last Monday after October 31st. Cake night in Ripon and Caking Day in Bradfield, Sheffield was November 1st. or All Hallows. On these dates boys and men conducted mumming activities from house to house collecting money for their cakes which were, as is parkin, made with oatmeal, butter and treacle. Soul mass cakes were made for the poor on November 2nd, All Souls' Day. In Lancashire thes cakes were oatcakes
but in York they were a kind of parkin."

Which brings me back to my starting point: a recipe for Thar Cakes from Tideswell in Derbyshire:

4 oz oats
4 oz flour
2 oz butter
2 oz brown sugar
tablespoon treacle
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
candied peel pinch salt

Melt sugar, butter, treacle. Add to dry ingredients. Form into walnut-sized balls. Bake 10 minutes in a moderate oven. Cool on tray.