Cornish Fairings

These belong to October and November. The first proper cold, the smell of woodsmoke from somebody's chimney, the early dark that arrives before you've quite finished the day. There are biscuits for summer, light and crumbly, and there are biscuits for now. Cornish fairings are firmly the latter.

They were sold at fairs across Cornwall in the 1800s, bought in paper bags as treats and tokens, given as gifts when courting. I don't know much more about the history than that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I do know is how they bake. The dough is soft and golden with syrup, the spices go in with a generous hand, and in the oven they spread and crack open across the top into deep, irregular fissures. The edges crisp. The middles stay chewy. The kitchen smells like the first week of December, even if it isn't.

I make a batch most years when the clocks go back. The afternoon goes dark at four, the kettle goes on, and a tray of these comes out of the oven still soft enough to bend. We're only making dinner, except this time we're making biscuits, and there's no real difference in the satisfaction of it. Putting a warm one into someone's hand with a mug of tea is one of the better things you can do on a Tuesday in November.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I got them right. Just three words: ginger, syrup, crack. That was enough to remember by.