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Girdle Cake
Rub three ounces of fresh butter into one pound of flour; add a pinch of salt, and as much butter-milk or cream as will make a stiff paste. Roll the paste out thin, and make into small round cakes. Bake on a girdle over the fire, and turn the cake over, so that both sides may be done. In Ireland, a little carbonate of soda is used instead of butter. Time, five to six minutes to bake. Probable cost, 4d. for this quantity. Sufficient for about one dozen cakes.
A plain buttermilk griddle scone, cooked on the hob rather than in an oven. The one thing to get right is the heat: a girdle wants to be steady and moderate, so the cakes colour slowly and the centre cooks through before the outsides scorch.
- "Girdle" means griddleA girdle is a flat iron plate or bakestone set over the fire, not a baking dish. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or flat griddle, ungreased and preheated over medium heat, is the direct equivalent.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. The liquid is given only as "as much as will make a stiff paste" — expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of buttermilk, added gradually, since flour absorbency varies.
- The soda sentence is garbledThe soda sentence reads oddly -- As printed, the Irish variation says soda is used "instead of butter." That may be a slip, or it may mean that Irish cakes of this kind leave out the rubbed-in fat and rely on soda for lightness. Either way, soda works with the buttermilk's acidity: about 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda per pound of flour, sifted in with the salt. If sweet cream rather than buttermilk is used, there is little acid for the soda to react with.
- Roll thin, and mean itThese cook entirely by contact heat with no oven behind them. Roll to about 1/4 inch; anything thicker will be raw in the middle at the five- or six-minute mark.
- Timing and turningFive to six minutes is the total, roughly half on each side. Turn once, when the underside is freckled and the surface looks dry at the edges. Press the centre — it should feel set rather than doughy.
- Handle the dough as little as possibleButtermilk and soda begin working immediately, and overworking a stiff paste makes the cakes tough. Bring it together, roll, cut, and cook without delay.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen small cakes. They are at their best within an hour of cooking, split and buttered while warm; reheat briefly on the dry pan rather than in a toaster.
- "Probable cost, 4d."Cassell's gives a probable cost in pre-decimal pence alongside its recipes. It is a period detail, not a figure that converts usefully.
Griddle baking is older than the domestic oven and outlasted it in regions where fuel was scarce and hearths were open: Scotland, Wales, the north of England and Ireland all kept a flat iron plate or a stone for the purpose, and "girdle" is the older Scots and northern English form of griddle. The Irish note reflects the nineteenth-century spread of cheap bicarbonate of soda, which in the middle decades of the century turned buttermilk from an ordinary liquid into a raising agent and gave rise to the family of soda breads and farls still cooked on a pan today.