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Wheatmeal Scones
Sift together one tea-spoonful of soda and one and a half of cream of tartar with three breakfast-cupfuls of wheatmeal, work in a table-spoonful and a half of butter, then mix in a beaten egg and a breakfast-cupful of milk. Mix all thoroughly together, and bake in small greased patty-tins. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain chemically raised scone dough, wetter than most modern scone recipes and baked in small tins rather than cut out and set on a sheet. The measurements are Victorian household ones and need translating before you start.
- Breakfast-cupfulA Victorian breakfast cup holds about 10 fl oz, so roughly 1 1/4 US cups. Three cupfuls of wheatmeal is about 15-16 oz (425-450 g) by weight, and the cupful of milk about 300 ml.
- WheatmealNot the same as modern wholemeal. It was a partly sifted flour with much of the coarse bran removed, sitting somewhere between white and wholemeal; the term was used loosely and no single extraction rate applies. Half wholemeal and half plain white flour gives a closer result than wholemeal alone, which will drink more liquid and bake heavier.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder made in the bowl. One teaspoon of soda with one and a half of cream of tartar is slightly soda-heavy by modern reckoning (two parts cream of tartar to one of soda is the usual ratio) and can leave a faint soapy note. If you prefer ready-made baking powder, three to four teaspoons is the nearer equivalent for this quantity of flour.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Scones want a hot oven, 425-450F (220-230C), for 12-15 minutes in small tins. A slack oven sets the crust too slowly and the raising gas escapes before the crumb has structure.
- Patty-tinsShallow round tins for small tarts and buns, closest today to a standard 12-hole bun or muffin tin. Grease them well; wheatmeal doughs stick. The mixture is soft enough to spoon in rather than roll and cut.
- Work fastOnce the milk and egg meet the soda the reaction has started. Mix only until the flour is damped, get the tins into the oven at once, and do not knead. This is the difference between a light scone and a close, tough one.
- Yield"Sufficient for six persons" suggests two apiece, so perhaps a dozen small scones, though the recipe does not say. Best eaten the day they are made.
Cassell's dates from the period when the oven was displacing the girdle for scones. The older Scottish scone was cooked on a flat iron plate over the fire, and many nineteenth-century recipes still call for soda with sour milk or buttermilk; here the acid comes instead from cream of tartar, the salt of tartaric acid, which was widely sold by grocers in the second half of the century and made chemical raising more reliable in domestic kitchens. Wheatmeal was promoted in Britain by bread-reform advocates who argued that white flour had been stripped of its goodness. The costing of sixpence for six people places it among the economical everyday bakes rather than the tea-table luxuries.