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Scones
Put as much barley-meal as will be required into a bowl, add a pinch of salt, and stir in cold water to make a stiff paste. Roll this out into round cakes a quarter of an inch thick, and bake on a girdle. Split the cakes open, butter them well, and serve hot. A little butter may be rubbed into the meal if liked. Richer scones may be made by dissolving an ounce of fresh butter in a pint of hot milk, and stirring this into as much flour as will make a stiff dough. When it is not convenient to bake the scones on a girdle, a thick frying-pan may be used instead. Time to bake the scones, about four minutes.
A griddle scone, not the oven scone most people picture — closer to a Scottish bannock, cooked flat on dry metal in about four minutes. The recipe assumes you know how to read a hot plate by hand, so heat control is the whole job.
- "Girdle" is a griddleThe Scots word for the flat iron plate hung over the fire. A heavy cast-iron skillet or flat griddle over medium heat is the direct equivalent, which the recipe itself concedes. Use it dry, or barely dusted with meal — not greased.
- Judge the heat before the dough goes onThe plate should be hot enough that a pinch of flour browns slowly rather than instantly. Too hot and the outside sets and scorches while the centre stays raw paste; too cool and the scone dries out before it colours. Four minutes total means roughly two minutes a side.
- Barley-mealGround barley, usually a little coarser than wheat flour; still sold by health-food shops and Scottish millers. It contains gluten (so it is not suitable for coeliacs) but forms very little elastic gluten network, so the dough will feel short and crumbly rather than springy, and the cakes stay dense and slightly sweet-earthy. Do not knead it hoping for springiness.
- There is no leavening hereNeither version calls for baking soda, cream of tartar or buttermilk, so expect a flat, close-textured cake — a bannock. If you want lift, that is a different recipe; this one relies on being split and buttered hot to be good.
- Quantities are deliberately open"As much meal as will be required" and "as much flour as will make a stiff dough" are proportion-by-feel instructions. For the richer version, 1 oz butter melted into 1 imperial pint (20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 cups) of hot milk will take a good deal of flour — add it gradually and stop when the dough is stiff. Work the dough as little as possible.
- Hot milk, cooled slightlyHot milk -- The recipe has the butter dissolved in hot milk and stirred straight into the flour, which gives a softer cake but a dough that is awkward to handle while warm. Let the milk come off the boil before mixing, and let the dough rest a couple of minutes before rolling.
- Shape and thicknessA quarter-inch is thin by modern scone standards and is what makes the four-minute time work. The recipe says round cakes; the common girdle alternative is one large round scored into quarters — 'farls', the word meaning a fourth part.
- Yield and servingSplit them while still hot, butter generously, and eat at once; griddle scones go leathery within the hour and are better split and re-toasted the next day than eaten cold.
Scones belong to the griddle long before they belonged to the oven. In Scotland and northern England the bakestone or girdle was the everyday bread-making tool in houses without a built oven, and barley, which ripens in short cool summers where wheat struggles, was the ordinary grain of the poorer table well into the nineteenth century. The name is generally traced to a Scots word first recorded in the early 1500s, itself often linked to Dutch schoonbrood or Low German Schönbrot, fine bread, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. What is telling about Cassell's placing of the recipe is the order of the two versions: the plain barley-and-water cake comes first as the base type, and the wheat-flour scone enriched with butter and milk is offered as the "richer" variant — a reminder that the fluffy, cream-served scone of the tea table was the exception, and the flat unleavened girdle cake the rule.