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Scones No. 2
4 ounces of butter 2 cups of flour 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder A pinch of salt 1/2 pint of milk Rub the butter and flour together, and add the baking powder, salt and milk. Mix all together thoroughly, and make into cakes about half an inch thick, any shape desired, and bake about twenty minutes.
A plain rich scone with no oven temperature and no yield given. Two details need attention before you start: the liquid is generous and the leavening is light by modern standards.
- The measurementsFour ounces of butter is one US stick, 8 tablespoons. Half a pint of milk is one cup by US measure; if the book is British, an imperial half-pint is 10 fluid ounces, so about a cup and a quarter.
- The dough will be very slackOne cup of milk against two cups of flour plus a stick of butter gives something closer to a thick batter than a scone dough. Add the milk gradually and stop when the dough just holds together for shaping, or expect to work in another half cup of flour on the board.
- Oven heatNone is stated. Scones want a hot oven, 425F, so the outside sets and the inside rises quickly; twenty minutes at that heat suits half-inch cakes.
- Baking powderA teaspoon and a half for two cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards, where a teaspoon or more per cup of flour is usual. Two teaspoons gives a better lift.
- Rubbing inKeep the butter cold and rub only to coarse crumbs with visible flakes. Rubbing until smooth, as the wording invites, melts the fat and costs you the layered break.
- HandlingMix until barely combined. Taken literally, 'mix all together thoroughly' will give tough scones; work the dough only enough to bring it together.
- Shape and yieldHalf an inch thick is thinner than a modern bakery scone and bakes through faster. No yield is given; with a 2-inch cutter the batch will run to well over a dozen small rounds. They are best within an hour of coming out of the oven.
Scones belong to the Scottish and northern English baking tradition, where a large soft round was baked on a girdle (griddle) and cut into wedges before serving; the sections, rather than the whole, gave the word its usual sense. The name's origin is disputed, most often traced to the Dutch schoonbrood or to Gaelic sgonn, and neither is settled. Oven scones of this kind spread with the availability of cheap chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why a recipe like this one needs neither yeast nor a long rise. The numbered titles suggest a book collecting several household versions of the same everyday bake.