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Scones, Barley-Meal
Mix well together two pounds of barley-meal, a small tea-spoonful of baking-soda, three-quarters of a tea-spoonful of cream of tartar, and half a tea-spoonful of salt. Add enough butter milk to make a nice soft dough. Sprinkle a little meal on the baking-board, and roll out the dough to a quarter of an inch thick. Cut into three, and bake on a moderately hot girdle. Probable cost, 6d.
A Scottish griddle bread rather than an oven scone, and the cooking surface is the thing that decides whether it works.
- "Girdle" means griddleA flat cast-iron plate heated over direct heat, not an oven. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or a flat bakestone does the same job. The recipe says only "moderately hot": a pinch of meal dropped on the surface should brown slowly rather than scorch.
- Cut into three, not into roundsThe rolled-out dough is cut into wedges; in Scotland such griddle wedges are called farls, though the word properly means a quarter. Cutting into four is the commoner division.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Allow roughly 5-8 minutes a side over steady heat, turning once. The scones should feel dry at the edges and sound hollow when tapped; barley browns fast, so keep the heat low enough that the centre sets before the surface colours.
- Barley mealGround barley, still sold as barley flour or fine barley meal in health-food shops and Scottish suppliers. It forms little gluten, so the dough will be short and slightly crumbly and must be handled lightly. Adding some plain wheat flour makes rolling easier, at the cost of the barley flavour.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is a homemade baking powder, activated further by the acid in the buttermilk. Get the dough onto the hot plate promptly, since the lift begins as soon as the liquid goes in.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from a carton works. Two pounds of barley meal will take a good deal, somewhere near a pint, but add it gradually and judge the dough as you go.
- QuantityTwo pounds of meal is a large batch by modern standards; the recipe divides it into just three pieces. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a household of two or three.
- ServingBest split and buttered while still warm. Barley scones stale quickly and are traditionally eaten the day they are made, or reheated briefly on the dry griddle.
Barley was among the everyday bread grains across much of Scotland and northern England long after wheat had taken over in the south, because it ripens in short, wet summers where wheat does not; oatmeal was at least as much the everyday meal in much of the country, with barley or bere dominant chiefly in the north and the isles. Griddle baking suited houses without ovens: the flat iron plate hung over the open fire served for bannocks, oatcakes and scones alike, and the word girdle is simply the Scots form of griddle. The chemical leavening here marks the recipe as Victorian rather than older; bicarbonate of soda paired with cream of tartar came into general domestic use during the nineteenth century and turned the flat, dense barley bannock into something lighter. Cassell's quotes the cost at sixpence, which for two pounds of meal signals a cheap, filling, workaday bake rather than a teatime luxury.