To mark the 150th anniversary of Jessie M Kings birth “The Little White Town of Never Weary” has been reprinted.
Alan James sent in the following query.
“I’m enjoying the new reprint of Jessie M King’s lovely ‘Little White Town of Never Weary’. In it, she mentions ‘long strips of gingerbread, brown and crusty, just like the edges of a baby’s flannel petticoat’, and they’re called PARLEYS’. I hadn’t come across those before, though I see in the SND (that they were popular in Scotland at least into the 1950s, and they were ‘parliament-cakes’; James Murray included them in the OED, though neither dictionary explains how they acquired that name. A quick Google search finds a blog that tells us they ‘were the creation of Mrs Flockhart (locally known as Luckie Fykie) of Potterrow … in Edinburgh. She had a little general grocer shop and tavern (which incidentally is no longer there because the student union is now there) which was allegedly visited by esteemed gentlemen of the Scottish Parliament, including the father of Sir Walter Scott, allegedly. The story says that these gentlemen would visit the shop but head through the shop into the back rooms (or ben the hoose as we would say), where they would drink whisky and eat parliament cake.’
Are you familiar with parleys? Are they still made, or even sold (or given by bakers to bairns coming into the shop)? Does Finlay Carson enjoy a parley while he’s parleying over coffee at Holyrood? You might care to ask on the FB site if there are memories of these treats in Kirkcudbright.”
Picking up the challenge I looked up F. Marian McNeill’s
“Scots Kitchen”
I found these two interesting pieces where not only does she give a recipe for the parleys but also information about Mrs Flockhart. Maybe they were an early form of gingersnaps? I wonder if they were ever “dunked” then?
