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Scotch Soda Scones
1 pound flour, 3/4 teaspoonful cream of tartar, 3/4 teaspoonful soda, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 pint buttermilk. Rub all the lumps out of the soda, mix dry ingredients first. Add enough butter-milk to make a light dough; turn out on a floured board and quickly knead till smooth. Press out to a round cake, divide it crosswise in four, place the scones on a floured griddle, and cook for ten minutes; turn them, and cook the other side for ten minutes. They should be pressed to 1/4-inch thickness, and will rise to be more than an inch. They can be rolled thinner if required. An ounce of butter makes the scones shorter.
A girdle (griddle) scone rather than an oven one: the dough is baked dry on a hot plate, split into four wedges called quarters or farls. The dough should be soft, barely kneaded, and on the griddle within a couple of minutes of mixing.
- Weigh the flourA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, and the ratio matters here more than volume guessing. Plain (all-purpose) flour is correct; the leavening comes entirely from the soda and cream of tartar.
- The buttermilk figure is a starting pointIf the pint is Imperial, half a pint is 10 fl oz, roughly 1 1/4 cups; an American half-pint would be 8 fl oz. Either way, the instruction to add "enough buttermilk to make a light dough" governs, and rather more may be needed depending on the flour.
- Cream of tartar plus sodaThis is homemade baking powder, and the acid in the buttermilk does part of the work. Sift or rub the soda through a fine sieve as directed, or you will get bitter yellow-brown flecks in the crumb.
- Griddle heatThe recipe specifies no temperature. Moderate heat, and the griddle floured rather than greased, as the recipe directs. Too hot and the outside sets black before the centre cooks.
- Ten minutes a side is for the thick versionThat timing suits dough pressed to 1/4 inch that rises past an inch. Rolled thinner, as the recipe allows, correspondingly less time will do. Test by breaking one open, or press the edge: it should feel dry and springy, not tacky.
- "Shorter" with butterThe recipe does not say when to add the optional ounce of butter; conventionally it would be rubbed into the dry ingredients before the buttermilk goes in. It gives a more tender, cakier scone; without it the result is leaner and more bread-like.
- Divide before cookingCut the round into four wedges while it is still on the board and lift them with a floured palette knife or bench scraper. Once on the griddle the dough is too soft to move cleanly.
- Yield and servingFour large wedges, enough for four to six at tea. They are eaten warm the day they are made, split and buttered; a day old they are best split and toasted.
Scotland baked on the girdle, a flat iron plate hung over the fire, long after ovens became common in English kitchens, and the soda scone belongs to that habit: a soft buttermilk dough cooked dry on metal in minutes rather than heated for an hour in a brick oven. The cream of tartar and soda pairing here is chemical leavening in its household form, the same combination sold pre-mixed as baking powder from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Cutting the round into four "quarters" or farls is standard practice, and the word scone is first recorded in Scots in the early sixteenth century, its origin disputed between Dutch schoonbrood and Gaelic sources.