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Buttermilk Scones
2 pounds Five Roses flour ¼ ounce carbonate of soda 1 pint sour milk or buttermilk Pinch of salt.
Mix to a light dough, roll out about ½ inch thick, and cut to desired shape.
Bake 15 minutes.
A bare-bones baker's formula: flour, soda, sour milk, salt. It scales large and it assumes you know your own oven.
- Weigh the flourTwo pounds is roughly 7 to 7½ cups of all-purpose flour, and weighing is far more reliable here than scooping. It should yield something like two dozen scones, depending on how you cut them; quarter everything for a household batch.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is plain baking soda. A quarter ounce is about 1½ level teaspoons — the correct proportion for a pint of buttermilk, and not a place to be generous, since excess soda tastes soapy and yellows the crumb.
- Which pintA Canadian imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces, so read it as 2½ cups rather than 2. Add it gradually; flour absorbency varies and the dough should be soft, not slack.
- Sour milk means real acidThe soda has nothing to react with unless the milk is genuinely acidic. The book's 'sour milk' meant raw milk soured naturally, which was acidic; modern pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than souring the same way. Cultured buttermilk works, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and 15 minutes only makes sense in a hot oven — 425–450°F. Bake on a lightly floured or parchment-lined sheet until the tops are set and lightly coloured.
- Handle it onceThe hinge of the recipe. Mix only until the dough coheres, roll to the specified ½ inch, and cut without twisting. Rerolled scraps come out tough and flat, and the soda begins losing lift the moment it meets the buttermilk.
- No fat, no sugarThese are plain scones, closer to a soda bread round than to a modern cream scone. With no fat in them they are best split hot and buttered, and they will go stale quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great Canadian flour promotions of the early twentieth century: recipes contributed by housewives across the Dominion, gathered to sell the brand of flour named in every ingredient list. Scones came to Canada with Scottish settlers, and the older form of the type was unleavened or barm-risen griddle bannocks — soda leavening spread through home baking in the middle of the nineteenth century and gave cooks a bread that could be mixed and on the table inside half an hour, without yeast or waiting. The proportions here are given by the pound and the pint because the book expected a reader baking for a large family.