"PARLIAMENT" CAKES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20922, 11 July 1931, Page 8 (Supplement)

"PARLIAMENT" CAKES.

A correspondent of the Sunday Times, London, writes ,to explain the meaning of the word " parliament," familiar to British public schoolboys, but a little puzzling to many readers of " Lorna Doone" and other famous novels. He says:—"l have in my possession an eighteenth-century recipe—the identical recipe, in fact, used by Mrs. Flockhart, better known as Luckie Fykie, the original of the Sirs. Flockhart, of Waverley, whose shop was well known to Sir Walter Scott in his Edinburgh school days; and the traditional parliament cakes, 'or parlies, as they are familiarly known, are still-made by the century-old Edinburgh firm of Mackie's. They are thin, square, crisp cakes, with a smooth, glossy surface—a" description whicH tallies with that of your previous correspondents who recollect their being sold in London- and elsewhere in their childhood.'

" Jamieson, in his ' Dictionary of the Scottish Language,' which was first published over 100 years ago, defines parliament cakes as a ' species of gingerbread supposed to have its name from bein'g used by members of the Scottish Parliament.'" ■