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Corn Meal Scones
2 cups corn meal 1 teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons butter Milk Mix the dry ingredients, rub in the butter, add sufficient cold milk to make a drop batter, bake on a griddle in muffin rings as you would ordinary muffins.
A griddle scone rather than an oven scone: the batter is dropped into metal rings set on a hot griddle and cooked like a thick muffin. Two details decide whether it works — the batter's consistency and the griddle's heat.
- "Drop batter"Thicker than pancake batter, loose enough to fall from a spoon in a lump without pouring. With 2 cups of cornmeal expect roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of milk, added gradually; cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid as it stands, so mix and cook promptly.
- Muffin ringsStraight-sided metal rings about 3 inches across and 3/4 to 1 inch deep, greased and set directly on the griddle. Egg rings or crumpet rings do the same job; failing those, use the well-greased bottomless outer ring of a small tart mould, or bake the batter in a greased muffin tin at 400F.
- Griddle heatModerate, not hot — roughly a medium setting on an electric griddle, in the region of 350F. They are thick and cook mainly by conduction from the griddle, so a fierce heat sets the bottom crust long before the centre is done. Allow several minutes a side, turning once the top looks dry at the edges.
- Which cornmealFine or medium yellow or white meal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising (which already contains leavening and salt). Modern degerminated supermarket meal behaves predictably here.
- ButterTwo teaspoons is about 1/3 oz — barely enough to coat the meal, so rub it in thoroughly with the fingertips. Adding a full tablespoon gives a more tender crumb without changing the method.
- No wheat flour, no eggThis is all cornmeal with chemical leavening only, so there is no gluten and no egg to hold the crumb. The result is crumbly and best eaten hot; treat it as cornbread in scone form, not as a British scone.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 rings. Serve straight off the griddle with butter, or split and toast leftovers, since they stale within hours.
Gold Medal cook books were promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, later General Mills, and were distributed cheaply or free to sell flour — which makes a wheatless page like this one somewhat unexpected. Cornmeal griddle cakes were long established in American cooking, and before reliable home ovens, batter cooked on a griddle or hearth was one practical way to make a soft, raised bread indoors. The word "scone" here appears to carry less its Scottish oven-baked sense than the older one of a flat round cooked on a griddle, as a girdle scone was. The muffin ring, a plain band of tinned iron, was common equipment in a period kitchen.