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Scones, Scalded
Mix together one pound of flour and half a tea-spoonful of salt; add boiling water to make a good firm dough. Divide it into portions, and roll out very thin on the baking-board sprinkled with flour. Cut each portion into three, and bake on a moderately hot girdle. Probable cost, 2d.
A flour-and-water girdle bread rather than a raised scone: the boiling water does all the work, gelatinising some of the starch so the dough rolls thin and stays tender without any leavening. Everything depends on the water actually boiling when it goes in.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingPour it straight from the kettle at a full boil and mix at once with a spoon or knife, not your hands. Water that has gone off the boil will not scald the flour properly, and the dough is likely to be harder to roll thin and less tender.
- A pound of flourAbout 450 g, or 3½ to 4 cups of plain (all-purpose) flour. A soft, low-protein flour suits this kind of girdle baking; anything sold as plain or all-purpose will do.
- Water quantity is not givenThe original leaves it to judgement, which is honest — absorption varies. Expect somewhere near 250-300 ml (1 to 1¼ cups), added gradually until the dough just holds together firmly. It should be stiff, not sticky.
- "Girdle" means griddleA Scottish girdle is a flat, heavy iron plate. A cast-iron griddle, a bakestone, or a thick frying pan over moderate heat is the equivalent. The recipe says only "moderately hot"; in modern terms that is roughly 350-375F at the surface, and a pinch of flour dropped on it should brown slowly rather than scorch.
- No fat on the panThese are baked dry. Dust the girdle with a little flour and brush it off between batches so it does not burn onto the surface.
- Roll thin, cook fastRolled genuinely thin — 2-3 mm — each triangle needs only 2 to 3 minutes a side, until freckled brown and dry through. Thick ones stay pasty in the middle because there is no raising agent to open the crumb.
- No rise expectedThere is no baking powder, soda or buttermilk here, so do not wait for lift. The texture should be closer to a soft oatcake or a flour tortilla than to a modern scone.
- Yield and servingA pound of flour gives roughly a dozen to fifteen triangles, depending how you divide it. Best eaten the day they are made, warm with butter; they stiffen quickly and are worth reheating briefly on the dry girdle.
Scalded or "water" scones belong to the Scottish and northern English tradition of girdle baking, which persisted in households that had a hearth and an iron plate but no reliable oven. The technique of pouring boiling water onto flour is the same principle behind scalded oatmeal bannocks and, further afield, hot-water pastry: heat swells the starch so a lean, fatless dough becomes workable and holds together. The "probable cost, 2d." is the giveaway or feeding a household cheaply from flour, salt and a kettle. The word scone itself is generally traced to Lowland Scots and first appears in print in the sixteenth century, long before chemical raising agents made the light, risen version standard.