Bannock
1½ pounds Five Roses flour ½ pound butter or lard ½ pound raisins ½ pound currants 1 ounce candied peel 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon carbonate of soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar Pinch of salt Buttermilk.
Rub the shortening into the flour, add other ingredients and mix with enough buttermilk to make a nice light dough.
Bake in moderate oven about 1 hour.
A Scots fruited bannock scaled for a large household, given in weights with no liquid quantity and no tin size. A few conversions and one judgment call about the dough make it straightforward.
- The weights in cups1½ lb flour is about 5½ cups; ½ lb butter or lard is 1 cup (two sticks); ½ lb each raisins and currants is roughly 1½ cups each; 1 oz candied peel is 2 to 3 tablespoons, chopped. If you have a scale, use the weights as written — this is a dough where the flour-to-fat ratio matters.
- Buttermilk is the unmeasured ingredientThe recipe leaves it to judgment. Start with about 1½ cups and add by tablespoons until the dough just holds together — a soft, slightly tacky scone dough, not a batter and not a bread dough. Overwetting is the common failure; the fruit releases moisture as it bakes.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are homemade baking powder, but the buttermilk also supplies acid, so the soda does double duty. Sift both through the flour thoroughly before the liquid goes in, and get the bannock into the oven promptly — the lift begins as soon as the buttermilk touches the soda.
- Moderate oven350°F. At an hour, that is a single thick round rather than individual scones, so resist the urge to bake it hotter.
- ShapingPat into one large round about 1½ to 2 inches thick on a lined sheet, and score a deep cross into the top so it breaks into four farls. Very large loaves may need a loose foil tent for the last 20 minutes to keep the raisins on the surface from scorching.
- DonenessA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the internal temperature should read 200 to 205°F. A fruited dough this heavy can look done long before the middle is set.
- Girdle versus ovenThe editor's note calls this a girdle cake — girdle being the Scots word for griddle. A dough this rich and this thick is an oven job; the griddle version is thinner, cooked in rounds a half-inch deep over steady moderate heat, turned once.
- Yield and keepingOne large bannock, 12 to 16 wedges. It cuts best fully cooled, keeps three or four days wrapped, and is often eaten sliced and buttered rather than warm from the oven.
Bannock in Scotland was originally a flat cake of oat or barley meal cooked on a girdle over the hearth, and the word long predates the fruited, sugared, wheat-flour version given here — that is the Victorian parlour descendant, closer to a Selkirk bannock or a large fruit scone than to anything a crofter would have recognised. Emigrant Scots carried both the name and the habit to Canada, where a much plainer relative of flour, fat, salt and water became a fixture of fur-trade posts and, later, of First Nations and Métis kitchens, cooked in a pan, on a stick or in the ashes. The Five Roses book sits at the point where those two lines meet: the brand was milled from hard Manitoba spring wheat by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and its cookbook was distributed in enormous numbers to households across the country, so the flour in this rich Scottish bannock is the same flour that made the plain one.