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Scones, Indian Meal and Flour
Mix together one pound of Indian meal, one pound of flour, one table-spoonful of treacle, one tea-spoonful of baking-soda, the same of cream of tartar, and half a tea-spoonful of salt. Add enough butter-milk to make a nice soft dough; divide it, and roll out each piece to about a quarter of an inch thick. Cut each piece into four, and bake on not too hot a girdle. Probable cost, 6d.
A griddle scone rather than an oven one, and the cornmeal is what makes it unusual — it needs a cooler pan and longer cooking than a plain flour scone.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal. The recipe does not specify a grind; a fine or medium cornmeal will hydrate properly in the dough, whereas a coarse one tends to stay gritty.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; one pound of cornmeal is about 3 cups. This is a large batch — halving it is sensible for a household of two or three.
- TreacleUse dark treacle or unsulphured molasses. A single tablespoon across two pounds of meal and flour is for colour and a faint bitterness, not sweetness, so golden syrup is not the same thing.
- The raisingSoda plus cream of tartar plus buttermilk is a home-mixed baking powder with extra acid. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly before the buttermilk goes in, then work fast — the gas starts leaving as soon as the liquid touches the soda.
- Buttermilk quantityNot specified, and it will vary with the cornmeal's absorbency. Expect somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups for the full batch, added gradually until the dough is soft but still handleable.
- "Not too hot a girdle"A girdle is a griddle or a heavy flat pan. This is the hinge of the recipe: cornmeal colours quickly, so keep the pan at medium-low and give the quarter-inch pieces long enough to cook through, turning once.
- YieldThe recipe says to divide the dough, roll each piece out and cut each into four; if it is halved, that gives eight wedges. Split and butter them hot; cornmeal scones stale quickly and are poor the next day unless reheated on the griddle.
- The cost noteSixpence was Cassell's estimate of what the ingredients would come to, useful chiefly for comparing one dish with another in the book rather than as a price the modern reader can convert.
Cornmeal reached British kitchens in quantity during the nineteenth century, and Victorian cookery writers generally called it "Indian meal" after the American usage — Indian corn being maize, as distinct from the grain crops the English loosely called corn. Cassell's presents this as one of a run of scone variations, and the maize here is doing the work cheaper flour would do: stretching the wheat in a household bread. The griddle rather than the oven places it in the Scottish and northern tradition, where the girdle hung over the fire and quick soda-raised breads were made; buttermilk, the by-product of butter-making, was the acid to hand before commercial baking powder became universal, and recipes like this one — soda and cream of tartar measured out separately — show cooks assembling their own leavening from first principles.