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Baking-Powder Breads: Scones
Pitcaithley Scones (Scotch recipe). 4 cupfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1½ cupfuls milk, teaspoonful salt.
Sift together the dry ingredients, rub in the butter, and mix to a soft dough with the milk. Turn out on a floured baking board and roll into rounds. Dust the griddle thinly with flour, slip on the round of dough, and cut into quarters. Bake slowly and do not turn until the top is beginning to show bubbles. Scones ought to be turned only once. Serve hot.
Maryland Biscuits. 1 quart flour, 1 cupful milk and water mixed, 1 tablespoonful shortening, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Rub the shortening into the flour and add the salt; mix the milk and water, and add them slowly to the flour, stirring all the while, until you have a hard, almost dry, dough. Put the dough out on a floured board and knead continuously for fifteen minutes, until it is soft and elastic. Then beat it, constantly folding, for twenty minutes longer. Roll out, cut in biscuits; prick the tops with a fork, stand in a pan so that they will not touch each other, and bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. The sides of these biscuits should be white but cooked, the tops and bottoms brown. - MRS. S. T. RORER. Popovers. 1 cupful sifted flour, teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful milk, 1 egg.
Three separate items run together here: a griddle scone, a beaten biscuit, and a popover whose method has been cut off mid-entry. The first two are complete and workable; the third gives ingredients only.
- Calumet baking powderA brand name; some household compilations of the period were produced or subsidised by baking-powder makers, though nothing on this page confirms that. Any modern double-acting baking powder can be substituted measure for measure; 3 teaspoons to 4 cups flour is on the low side of the usual 1 to 1½ teaspoons per cup.
- "Bake slowly" on a griddleModerate, steady heat on a heavy pan or griddle, ungreased and dusted with flour. Too hot and the outside browns while the centre stays raw; the recipe uses the bubbles on the surface as the signal to turn.
- Cut into quartersThe quartered wedges are farls, the standard Scottish griddle-scone shape. Roll the round fairly thin (the recipe gives no thickness), cut on the griddle as directed so the pieces stay in place, and turn once only, as the recipe insists.
- Maryland biscuits: a quart of flourMeasured dry, 4 cups, or about 1 lb. Use plain flour; there is no leavening at all in this dough, which is why the beating matters.
- Fifteen minutes kneading, twenty minutes beatingThis is not exaggeration. Beaten biscuits are leavened only by air and steam forced into a very stiff dough, traditionally with a mallet or the flat of an axe on a stump. A stand mixer with a dough hook, or a rolling pin used to fold and flatten repeatedly, will do it; the dough is ready when it blisters and turns satiny.
- "Moderate oven"Conventionally around 350F. Thirty minutes at that heat gives the described result: sides white but cooked, tops and bottoms brown. Prick the tops so they do not balloon.
- The popover entry is incompleteFlour, salt, milk and one egg are the ingredients, but the mixing and baking directions were not carried onto this page. Popovers need a hot oven and a preheated pan; consult a full recipe rather than guessing from the list.
- YieldNeither recipe states a yield; the scone dough will make two or three rounds depending on thickness, so eight to twelve farls, and the biscuit dough perhaps a couple of dozen small biscuits. Both are meant to be eaten hot.
The name is a puzzle worth noting: Pitcaithly, near Bridge of Earn in Perthshire, is far better known for Pitcaithly bannock, a rich shortbread studded with almonds and citron, not for a plain milk-and-butter griddle scone. This recipe is in substance an ordinary baking-powder scone baked on the girdle, the flat iron plate that hung over a Scottish hearth long before ovens were common in domestic kitchens. The Maryland biscuit beside it comes from Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School and one of the most widely reprinted cookery authorities of the period; beaten biscuits were a Chesapeake and Upper South tradition, a bread that used muscle instead of yeast or chemical leavening.