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Raisin Scones
3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup butter 1 cup lightest yellow sugar 1 cup sweet milk ( cream if desired) 1 cup chopped raisins 1 egg (white).
Mix and add raisins and well-beaten white of egg last. Roll about ½ inch thick, spread with the yolk of egg well-beaten.
Cut into triangles or squares. Bake.
A rich, sweet scone with an unusually high proportion of butter and sugar, closer to a tea biscuit than a plain Scottish scone. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the two things missing are heat and time.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are set and the egg wash has coloured. The high butter content means they brown quickly at the edges, so watch the last few minutes.
- "Lightest yellow sugar"This means the palest grade of unrefined or lightly refined cane sugar, a step up from white in colour but not a dark brown. Light brown sugar is the closest match; plain granulated works and simply tastes less caramel.
- Sweet milkFresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk that would otherwise be on hand. Whole milk is right; the cream option gives a noticeably shorter, richer crumb.
- Handling the butterA full cup of butter to three cups of flour is a lot. Work it in cold and quickly, as for pastry, and stop while the mixture is still coarse. Warm butter and overworking are what turn this dough greasy and tough.
- The eggThe white is beaten and folded in last as a lightener; the yolk is beaten separately and brushed over the rolled sheet as a glaze before cutting. Do not use the whole egg in the dough.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for three cups of flour is on the low side by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon or a little more per cup. These will be on the dense side; increase to a scant tablespoon if you want more lift.
- RaisinsChop them and toss with a spoonful of the measured flour so they stay suspended rather than sinking and scorching on the bottom.
- YieldA half-inch sheet from this quantity cuts into roughly sixteen to twenty scones, depending on size. They are best the day they are baked.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed cheaply to purchasers of its flour, which is why the brand name is written into the ingredient list rather than simply "flour" -- the book was an advertisement that happened to be genuinely useful, and it became a fixture in Canadian kitchens for decades. The scone itself is Scottish in origin, originally a soft, barely sweetened round baked on a girdle and cut into wedges; the name is generally traced either to the Dutch schoonbrood or to Middle Low German schonbrot, both meaning fine bread, though the derivation is not settled. What happened to it in North America is visible here: a cup each of butter and sugar, raisins, an egg glaze. This is a scone drifting toward cake.