Home › The Principles of Cookery › Scones, Soda
Scones, Soda
Dissolve half a salt-spoonful of carbonate of soda and five ounces of fresh butter or lard in a quarter of a pint of warm water or milk: put ten ounces of flour into a bowl, add a pinch of salt, and stir in the liquor to make a stiff dough. Roll this out into a round cake a quarter of an inch thick, mark this into eight portions, and bake on a girdle or in a thick frying-pan. Split the scones, butter them well, and serve very hot. Time to bake, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d.
A girdle scone rather than an oven scone: one large round marked into eight, cooked dry on a hot plate. The dough is unusually rich and, as written, has nothing acidic to react with the soda.
- The soda has no partnerCarbonate of soda needs an acid to give off gas. With plain warm water or fresh milk there is nothing to react with, so the scones rise very little and can carry a faint soapy note. Buttermilk or soured milk in place of the water would supply the acid, as in many Scottish girdle scones; alternatively about twice the soda's volume in cream of tartar with sweet milk does the same job.
- Salt-spoonfulThe salt spoon of a Victorian cruet set held roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is about an eighth of a teaspoon — a very small amount of soda for 10 oz of flour.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about three-fifths of a US cup. Ten ounces of flour is roughly 2¼ cups by weight; weigh it if you can, since scooped flour runs heavy and this dough is meant to be stiff, not dry.
- Five ounces of fatThat is half the weight of the flour, which is closer to a shortbread than a modern scone. It gives a crumbly, short round that browns fast on the girdle. Three ounces makes a lighter scone if you want one that splits cleanly.
- GirdleThe Scots girdle is a flat, heavy iron plate hung over the fire — a cast-iron griddle or a heavy skillet is the direct equivalent. No fat in the pan: it should be dry, and hot enough that a scattering of flour browns slowly rather than instantly, around medium-low.
- The timingFifteen to twenty minutes is right for a quarter-inch round cooked through on a plate rather than in an oven, but it means roughly seven to ten minutes a side over gentle heat. Too hot a girdle sets the outside dark while the centre stays raw and gluey; cut through a scone at the marked line to check.
- Mark, do not cutScoring the round into eight wedges before it goes on the pan lets them break apart cleanly after cooking while the cake stays in one piece on the girdle.
- YieldEight wedges from one round — enough for four at tea. They are at their best within the hour, split and buttered while still hot, as the recipe says; reheat rather than eat cold.
Girdle baking is older in Scotland and the north of Ireland than domestic ovens are, and the flat iron plate over the fire produced the whole family of soda scones, bannocks and farls that a book like Cassell's was recording as regional standards for a London readership. Bicarbonate of soda became a cheap grocer's staple over the middle of the nineteenth century, and it transformed this kind of baking: where a cook had once relied on barm or a long-fermented sponge, she could now make a raising agent work in the few minutes it took to mix a stiff dough, provided she had sour milk or buttermilk to hand. Cassell's notes the probable cost at sixpence, part of the dictionary's habit of costing dishes — a reminder that this was reference literature for running a household, not aspirational cooking.