Some Yorkshire Good Cheer

IT is a difficult matter definitely to decide which of the two concomitant pleasures of a trip abroad, anticipation or retrospect, is the better. Perhaps the choice between the two is a question of taste, and depends upon whether one likes most to feel one’s self largely sanguine, or soberly certain of only a limited number of pleasant realities. There is no doubt about the sanguine character of the period which precedes a pleasure tour. No one counts then on checks and disappointments, or fosters suspicions of the trickiness of circumstances, —such as weather, — or has misgivings of his own entire competency to plan an itinerary free from diabolical feuds with time-tables and railway connections : one’s mind is bent on nothing but the mastering of maps and guidebooks, finger-posts to the Utopias with which imagination is busy flirting and coquetting. The date of sailing looms up before one as the birthday to a sort of intellectual and æsthetic vita nuova ; on the other side, an elect section of earth, comprising the tour on which one has finally settled, seems to exist expressly for the delectation of rambling inmates of inns and lodging-houses. The other type of pleasure is necessarily of later date. It comes only after one’s trunks, becomingly battered, and decorated all over with those treasured souvenirs the railway and hotel labels, have been sent empty to the attic ; and after certain peccadillos in the custom-house, of several sorts but of identical intent, have gently faded from memory or ceased to twinge an uneasy conscience. Then, by degrees, one becomes sensible of the unforeseen charms of the homely and unregarded experiences of travel. A respectable library of volumes on architecture, from the A B C of Gothic upward, went, very likely, to the making of one’s preparation for sightseeing ; and some fine day one is surprised at finding that it is not of Canterbury Cathedral at all, but of a wayside cottage, perhaps, with a garden full of gillyflowers and snapdragon running down to the roadside, that one is thinking and dreaming. There are moods of retrospection that can be fed only by trivialities ; times of cosy communings with one’s own thoughts, when one breaks away from all that is warranted worth thinking about, and is content to drift rudderless among the shoals and shallows of recollection.

In England, there is no county that lends itself to light reminiscences of a gastronomical nature so well as Yorkshire. To the outside uninitiated world, Yorkshire of course stands irretrievably committed for her puddings, in the same way that Cheshire and the vale of Cheddar do for their cheeses. But those who are fortunate enough to be in the culinavy secrets of the shire know very well that her final disclosure of unique cookery has not been made in this solid staple of diet, locally known, with its familiar appendage the joint, as “ beef and Yorkshire.” The dietary productiveness of Yorkshire can by no means be measured by, say, that of the ancient town of Bath, parent and sponsor of one sole edible, the sadly indigestible, though meagre, Bath bur. The good cheer of Yorkshire is as generous in quantity as the climate is provocative of an appetite that corresponds. In the East and North Ridings in particular, a high-class bakery, the purveyor to liberal breakfast and tea tables, fairly overflows with the variety of its farinaceous delicacies. There are on its shelves tea-cakes sweetened and unsweetened. large tea-cakes and small ones, teacakes with currants and tea-cakes without ; there are muffins brown and white, muffins made of whole-meal flour and muffins baked from fine wheaten flour ; and there are still other cakes, whose names remain among the unsolved local mysteries of the county. Better, however, than any of these, richer and more spicy, is the round, plump, generously stuffed twopenny pork pie, — twopence only, or threepence at the most, but, with a cup of something hot or a glass of something sparkling, quite large enough for a famishing tourist’s luncheon. You are conscious, while consuming your pork pie, of a gratifying sense of security about its pedigree. Not every day do you have before you on the board a viand of as ancient lineage as this. Just when its family was founded need not be a matter of too definite inquiry, unless indeed the deepening thirst of ancestry — born, no doubt, of the overdose of democracy in the New World — pursue one without respite. Certain it is that the family of pork pie, if perchance a trifle less aristocratic, is as old as that of venison pasty, and that it has played a part as useful, if not as prominent in romantic fiction, as the pasty, in feeding hungry generations before the soil on which you yourself were bred had felt the imprint of plough or spade. The family coat of pork pie has, moreover, no ghostly quarterings. Peer as far back as you choose, there is no eerie legend to chill your imagination, as for instance there is in the case of the hot cross-bun. It is not entirely comfortable to reflect that if you should eat a hot cross-bun you would be swallowing the symbol wherewith the heathen goddess Eastre was exorcised from and dispossessed of cakes especially consecrated to herself. Discovery of this sort opens the way to nightmares and creeping fancies. But there is no pagan strain in the heredity of pork pie, no taint of the mythical or problematical; in it all turns out to be toothsome, jellied, and substantial.

One has met with tourists who have gone to Greenwich without stopping there to sit down to whitebait; so, doubtless, there are some who have gone the diversified length and breadth of Yorkshire without having once come upon parkin : personally, one would prefer not to belong to either class. Not to have tasted for one’s self the peculiar kernelly consistency and the fine nutty flavor of parkin is to have missed a unique gustatory experience. Parkin has possibly a faraway cousinship with gingerbread, but it has no close ties of consanguinity with any cake that comes out of an oven. Oatmeal and treacle are the bases of its composition, the solid fond of the more subtle ingredients of its character, though, even if one were possessed of sufficiently acute powers of analysis to detect them, the naming of all its component parts would no move convey an idea of the completed cake than enumerating the pigments used on a canvas would describe the picture. Much naturally depends on the genius of the cook who mixes and bakes the parkin. In no spot is it to be found in finer perfection than just on the threshold of the shire, in the town of York itself, under the very shadow of the minster. Two things there are to be done in York, which, though as widely sundered as the poles in their general nature, are yet alike in one respect, inasmuch as each gives a sense of especial familiarity with the local conditions of a particular period, — that sense of temporary intimacy with what is remote in time or place that constitutes one of the chief inducements for knocking about in unknown parts. One of these two things is to go to the museum of antiquities, in the grounds of St. Mary’s Abbey, and look at the Roman lady’s back hair; the other is to go and spend a sixpence in parkin, confident that any urchin in the town would be delighted so to spend it in your stead. That abundant dark hair in the museum lies in the same folds into which it was coiled when the Roman lady was laid in her stone coffin, in the days when a Roman emperor, and not an archbishop, was the city’s chief dignitary ; even the hairpins that held it in place are still stuck through its mass, to the wonder and admiration of the sightseer. As to parkin, there is a time for buying it, as there is a fitting time for all business, grave or merry. This time is the hour of mental exhaustion that follows upon the tour of the cathedral. When brain and eyeballs have united in their refusal to receive, from nave, chapter - house, or crypt, one impression more, it is possible to secure the needed reaction of emotion by proceeding directly from the south transept into the quaint street it faces, and thence into the bakeshop which stands on the first corner to the right. At the baek of this shop, in the tiniest and neatest of luncheon-rooms, at a round white table, one may discuss, among a variety of other light refreshments, the unfamiliar merits of parkin. Parkin, freshly baked, may here be bought by the slice or the pound. In other places, where its longevity is greater, it is sold in boxes, from the twopenny box to the box for a shilling and upward. In York, however, it has precisely the right degree of rich brown freshness, beside the qualities that may be warranted as commensurate with the appetite of a growing boy at boardingschool.

It cannot be claimed that parkin is, after all, in any wise superior to human nature’s mere daily food. In view, therefore, of the large proportion of mankind that cannot be touched with a feeling for the modest pleasures and pains that are hidden beneath homespun, there will undoubtedly be a contingent of tourists to whom the wholesome oaten and syrupy flavors of parkin will be caviare. To such as these, inflexible aristocrats in their incidental diversions even, the shop of the Yorkshire confectioner can still offer attractions. It would hardly be possible to find anywhere a cake of which the composition is more intricate and more artful than that of simnel, or one whose useful or nutritious ingredients are more inscrutably concealed beneath an icing of conventional almond paste; and simnel is a prime Yorkshire specialty. To be introduced to it in proper form, amid all the accessories which constitute its appropriate retinue of impressions, it is necessary to go to Scarborough, the flaunting queen of northern watering-places. Scarborough is the last place left in the kingdom where postilions are not an exclusive adjunct of royalty riding in state, but where any one who chooses may still ride behind them, though even in Scarborough they appear in the diminished form of boys, riding on ponies which are attached to low chaises, on the order of Bath chairs. Their striped caps, top-boots, and vivid red, yellow, or blue breeches and shirts give a gay appearance to the streets of the town, and they seem — though it is no more than seeming— to impart by their jockeying and their flourishing of whips a post-haste speed to their turnouts. One of these boy postilions will, after his various misapprehensions of one’s wishes have been experimentally cleared up, bring one to the shop where simnel is made and sold, and whence it is sent carriage-paid (if the order is a handsome one) to “ any railway station in Great Britain.”

Simnel, it will soon be discovered, is not to be bought for a song. Half a crown is the lowest figure one of the 舠 original and far-famed ” simnel cakes goes for, and even a good golden guinea has not been thought too handsome a coin to lay out in a cake of the pretensions of simnel. To appreciate, however, its intrinsic cheapness, notwithstanding its apparent dearness, one has but to reflect what it is that one is getting for one’s money. Here you have, in the first place, a cake whose etymology has set the linguists a-thinking, and the gossips to wagging their foolish tongues in a tale of a discreditable Simon and Nelly. Simila is the Latin for wheat flour of the finest quality, and the Low Latin simenellus stands for bread of fine flour, as does the Old French simenel ; in Germany, moreover, simnel has a suspected relative still living on the current tongue, — Semmel, or wheat bread. Such a genealogical tree for your cake is more pleasing than the oldwives’ invention of a quarreling gammer and gaffer, Sim and Nel. You are also to bear in mind that in becoming possessed of a simnel you are making a definite æsthetic even if it is not a practical acquisition for your mental furnishing ; in other words, you are giving tangible quality to one of your hitherto more or less vague literary conceptions, inasmuch as this is the identical cake the poet Herrick bad in view when he wrote : —

There is a kind of shopping it is pleasant to engage in once in a while, which may be undertaken, not for the sake of what the shopman will actually hand out over the counter, but as a special variety of sentimental indulgence. On occasions of this kind, a purchase, whatever its nature, merely serves the purpose of a magnet to trains of reflection ; it is a loadstone to draw out from dim regions of the mind into the full light of consciousness all sorts of dormant associations and affiliations of idea. Such, in some sort, is the bargain that is driven in buying this “ good round sugarye King of Cakes, a Symnelle,” whether it be bought in Yorkshire or at the more famous Buzzard’s in Oxford Street. It is well, in any case, to have on hand a cake dedicated, as was this, to filial piety. Mothering Sunday has dropped out of our cold modern calendar, but in the fair Dianeme’s day it fell on mid-Sunday in Lent. On that day, sons and daughters, grown up and scattered abroad in the world, made a pious duty of visiting their parents, taking with them a cake such as that with which the poet promised to provide his obdurate lady-love, a kind return for the

At Bolton-le-Moors, in Lancashire, they are said still to keep their simnel Sunday, as the French yet do their miCarême. For this particular feast no cake could he devised that would better serve the purposes of domestic economy than simnel. Although mid-Lent Sunday is a single feast-day which is succeeded by a score or so of fast-days, simnel would at their end be found to have lost nothing of its moistness or flavor. Well does the visitor in England know the sultana and the Madeira cake of the present day, put up for indefinite preservation, in glazed papers, by Huntly & Palmer, biscuit - makers in ordinary to the British public at large : and well does he know the state of crummy decrepitude into which these favorite cakes are allowed to fall before they disappear from the tea-tables of our frugal cousins. But in the quality of drying up simnel has no relationship with Madeira or with sultana cake. Its kinship is rather with the English rose, which is so tenacious of its sweetness and freshness that even if bought in the streets of London, it may, unlike the frailer blossoms sprung from our own soil, be counted among one’s fairly durable possessions.

If one happen to be afflicted with a fondness for English life that can find a fascination in even its minute details, there may always lurk in one’s mind a shamefaced regret at never having known from experience the joys of making one’s cheeks sticky with bull’s-eyes, purchased, surreptitiously perhaps, in a tiny shop, from a dame in a frilled white cap. When the opportunity comes, later in life, of testing the qualities of bull’seyes, it would be too embarrassing to go into the tiny shop of the story-book and confide one’s wish to the tidy dame in charge, even could the shop be found. Some pleasures there are which, if not enjoyed in the right decade, must be resigned forever. But there is a commodity sold in Scarborough which, if one likes, will in a measure make amends for an early disappointment in regard to bull’seyes. If time is abundant, the day sparklingly clear, the fine air like wine to the spirits, and the vast curve of white beach under the dazzling cliffs alive with the throng of Cockney holiday-makers, it will not seem out of harmony with the universal frame of things to go shopping for Scarborough pebbles. Name and qualities to the contrary, the pebbles are a sweet, a sugar-plum, save the mark ! The Scarborough confectioner whose invention they are has shown himself an adept at imitation. Look at the large bowl of them in his window, and you can hardly believe your eyes but that they are veritable pebbles ; they have all the freaks of outline, stripe, and dull brownish or yellowish tone of the wavetossed, water-worn shingle of the beach. You may take them home to your small cousins to play at jackstones with, and their knuckles may be trusted never to suspect the difference. But the Scarborough confectioner’s British idea of “ candy,"— there is where the joke would come in, in the eyes of any sophisticated American boy. A Yorkshire baker, however, even in swarming, Philistine Scarborough, is not the man to pander to a taste for new-fangled invention in sweets ; he bakes according to his conscience and the recipes of his forefathers. What was good enough for them should be good enough for you. And so it will be if you have an honest appetite, satisfied with honest fare that has no foreign trickery in its names, — names that a sturdy Yorkshire tongue, endued with the proper thickness and burr, would refuse to turn off with any recognizable likeness to the original.

If it were not for one of the arbitrary freaks of association, which now and then make a laughing-stock of logic and put to rout the most painstaking systematizing of one’s knowledge, one would never dream of classing together under any common head Scarborough and Beverly. In Scarborough, one may sigh, and sigh in vain, for a single hour of soothing, open-air solitude; in Beverly, solitude seizes upon and oppresses one with its weight. The lonely minster and still lonelier St. Mary’s seem to cry out for congregations to fill their large spaces, or even for tourists rudely to disturb the lethargy of ages in which they are buried. Between the two lofty and imposing churches crookedly rambles the little market-town, oblivious of the stately sentinels that guard it at either end. There is a good deal of fussy life going on in its single thoroughfare, and as you jostle along the narrow sidewalk your eye is caught by the repetition in several windows of a large printed sign surmounting a red-and-white mass of something edible. Peppermint candy would be the nearest approach to a translation of its name into the American tongue, but Beverly rock is its native cognomen. Beverly rock has many properties in common with Scarborough pebbles. Both resemble in hardness the igneous formation which geologists tell us is composed of “ quartz, feldspar, and mica arranged in distinct grains or crystals.” But Beverly rock has, on the other hand, no suggestion of poison in its colors or flavors; it is of a good healthy white and pink, like the Yorkshire complexion ; and although there may be little in its composition to endear it to palates unfamiliar with it, it nevertheless belongs, like the pebbles of Scarborough, among those comestibles which mean to the traveler more than meets the taste.

There are in touring, as in morals, acts of supererogation and acts of necessity. If one chooses, one may travel through the length and breadth of Yorkshire without so much as seeing the color of parkin or of any other saccharine invention of cook or confectioner; but under no circumstances must one rush ever so superficially through the least of the Ridings without making acquaintance with the tender virtues of Yorkshire ducklings. In the making of ducklings Nature herself has taken a hand, and has shown her usual exquisite perfection of manipulation. It is as if it had been her pride to prove that, when it is her sweet will to do so, she can mould in the barnyard a creature as delicately flavored and finely textured as those she fashions amid heather and bracken on the moorland. She has taken care that the pond on which he essays his first callow feats of swimming shall be replenished and sweetened by daily showers, and that not so much as a stray feather shall be left to foul its surface. The skinny chicken of the London table, with his prominent anatomy and alarmingly protuberant breast-bone, the tourist must perforce know well. This sorry specimen may heretofore have been all that he has come across, outside the pages of Audubon, of the British bird. Henceforth the Yorkshire duckling will nobly replace the London fowl in all casual gastronomical reminiscences. Your duck is a pleasant sight when he comes in fresh from market, still dressed in his shiny feathers, before he disappears into the custody of the landlady. See to it, by all means, that he be dry-plucked. Only when he and his feathers have parted company in this fashion will be later attain the full meridian of flavor and juiciness. The herb-garden must be laid under generous contribution for his stuffing ; the more deeply the perfume of an old and well-stocked kitchen-garden is intermingled with his own aroma, the better for him in one’s memory. Applesauce (never bread-sauce; Heaven forbid that a bit of his flesh should he poulticed by this glutinous compound ! ) — apple-sauce must flank the dish on which he is laid out brown and crisp. Then he may be eaten in open defiance of the claims of roast pig, and in full confidence that Charles Lamb could never have tasted a roasted duckling in Yorkshire, else would duckling, without a doubt, have received long ago its undeservedly withheld apotheosis.

Eugenia Skelding.