Home › Gems, Scones and Muffins › Oatmeal Scones
Oatmeal Scones
1 cup baking oatmeal (standard variety) 1½ cups Five Roses flour ½ cup shortening ½ cup brown sugar ½ teaspoon soda Sour cream to make firm dough (about ½ cup).
Do not roll but press with the hands into long strips about 2 inches wide and one-half inch thick. Hack with back of knife into deep ridges crosswise. Cut into 3-inch lengths and bake in hot oven.
Cold oat porridge is sometimes used instead of oatmeal.
A plain Scots-style oat scone, stiff enough to be patted rather than rolled. The original assumes a cook who knows her flour and her oven, so a few numbers are worth pinning down.
- The hinge: press, don't rollRolling develops the flour and compacts the oats, giving a hard scone. Pat the dough out with your hands to the stated 2 inches wide and half an inch thick and leave it slightly ragged.
- "Baking oatmeal (standard variety)"This most likely means rolled oats of the ordinary thickness sold for porridge, rather than steel-cut or pinhead oats or instant. Quick oats will work but give a softer, less distinct crumb.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Modern all-purpose is a direct substitute; the dough may take slightly less liquid.
- Soda and sour creamThe soda is raised by the acid in the cream, so the cream must be genuinely sour. Cultured sour cream from a tub works; sweet cream will not, and the scones will taste soapy. Buttermilk is the usual stand-in, though the dough will be slacker and needs a little more flour.
- SaltNone is listed; the shortening, if lard or butter, may already have carried some. Half a teaspoon is worth adding with the dry ingredients.
- ShorteningAt this date the word meant lard or a lard-and-butter mixture as often as it meant vegetable shortening. Butter gives the better flavour here; rub or cut it into the flour and oats while cold.
- "Hack with the back of a knife"You are scoring deep ridges across the strip, not cutting through it. The ridges open in the oven and give the finished scone its ribbed top.
- Hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a "hot oven" is usually read as roughly 400-450F, so about 425F. The pieces are small and should take about 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are set and the tops lightly coloured.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to fourteen 3-inch scones, depending on how thin you press the strips.
- The porridge variantCold oat porridge brings its own water, so if you use it in place of dry oatmeal you will need far less sour cream, perhaps none. Add liquid a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds.
Oat scones belong to the Scottish baking tradition that came to Canada with settlers from the Lowlands and the Highlands, where oats grew where wheat would not and the girdle or bakestone did the work of an oven. The word scone is generally traced to Scots usage of the sixteenth century, and the earliest ones were closer to a large flat round scored into wedges than to the risen wheat scone of later English tea tables. The chemistry here is soda quickened by sour cream, a household staple in the era before homogenised milk. The Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the offhand thrift of the closing line about using up yesterday's cold porridge.