Home › The Principles of Cookery › Soda Scones
Soda Scones
Make a stiff paste with a pound of flour, a quarter of an ounce of carbonate of soda, and as much buttermilk as is required. Roll this out to the thickness of half an inch, cut it into small three-cornered pieces, and bake these on a girdle over a clear fire. When done enough, cut the scones open, butter them with fresh butter, and serve hot. If more convenient, milk a day old may be substituted for the buttermilk.
A girdle scone, not an oven scone: this is a soft soda dough cooked dry on a hot plate, closer to a soda farl than to the butter-rich teatime scone. The dough should be mixed and on the heat within a couple of minutes.
- Work fast, handle littleThe soda begins reacting with the buttermilk acid the moment they meet, and most of the lift is gone within a few minutes. Mix to a shaggy dough with a light hand, roll once, cut, and cook straight away rather than resting it.
- The soda quantityA quarter of an ounce is about 7 g, roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 teaspoons for a pound (450 g) of flour. That is at the upper end of modern practice and will taste soapy unless the buttermilk is genuinely sour; 1 teaspoon is safer with commercial cultured buttermilk.
- SaltNone is listed. Add about a teaspoon to the dry flour or the scones will taste flat.
- "Girdle"A griddle or bakestone, meaning a flat iron plate. A heavy cast-iron frying pan or a flat electric griddle over a steady moderate heat does the same job. Cook without fat, dusting the plate with flour if it sticks, roughly 4-5 minutes a side until the surface is speckled and the edges look set.
- Judging when doneA half-inch scone should sound hollow when tapped and show no damp line when torn. If the outsides colour before the middle sets, the plate is too hot; lower the heat rather than shortening the time.
- "Milk a day old"This means raw milk that has soured naturally, which modern pasteurised milk will not do; it simply spoils. Use cultured buttermilk, or sour fresh milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup and let it stand ten minutes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number. A pound of flour rolled to half an inch will make something in the region of a dozen small three-cornered pieces, depending how small you cut them.
- ServingSplit and buttered while hot is the point of the recipe. They stale within hours; leftovers are better split and toasted than reheated whole.
Soda scones belong to the griddle-baking tradition of Scotland and the north of Ireland, where until well into the twentieth century many households had no oven and baked on an iron plate hung over the fire. Carbonate of soda became generally available to ordinary kitchens over the course of the earlier nineteenth century, and paired with the acid in sour milk or buttermilk it raised bread in minutes where barm or yeast had needed hours. The three-cornered cut is practical rather than decorative, being what you get when a round of dough is quartered on the plate.