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Scones
2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons shortening 2 eggs 1/3 cup milk Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar; add shortening and rub in very lightly. Beat eggs until light; add milk to eggs and add slowly to mixture. Roll out 1/2 inch thick on floured board; cut into pieces 3 inches square and fold over, making them three-cornered; brush with milk; dust with sugar. Bake about 25 minutes in hot oven.
A plain egg-rich scone from a baking powder company's promotional booklet. Two details need attention: the oven and the baking time.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 425-450F. For a scone of this size 425F is the safer end, with the tray on an upper-middle rack.
- Cut the timeTwenty-five minutes is likely to dry these out. Start checking at 12 minutes and expect roughly 12-18 minutes; they are done when the tops are set and lightly browned and the folded edge no longer looks damp. Note that folding a 3-inch square corner to corner gives two layers, not three.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is at the upper end of modern practice. It works, but with a modern double-acting powder 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons gives less of a metallic aftertaste, and you can drop the salt to 1/2 teaspoon if the fat you use is salted.
- ShorteningIn period American usage the word generally means a solid fat: lard, or the vegetable shortening that came on the market in the 1910s. The recipe does not specify. Cold unsalted butter, cut in until the mixture looks like coarse meal, gives the best flavour and a little flakiness.
- Eggs and liquidEggs may have run somewhat smaller than today's large ones, though that is hard to pin down. With two large eggs the 1/3 cup milk may be more than you need; hold back a spoonful or two and add it only if the dough will not come together.
- HandlingRub the fat in lightly, as instructed, and stop mixing the moment the dough coheres. Overworked scone dough bakes tough and squat regardless of how much baking powder is in it.
- The foldCutting 3-inch squares and folding them corner to corner gives a triangle with a layered spine. Press the fold only lightly so the layers stay distinct.
- YieldAbout eight or nine triangles. Best eaten within a few hours of baking.
Scones are Scottish in origin, and the name is generally traced either to the Dutch schoonbrood, fine white bread, or to the Middle Low German schonbrot; the earliest examples were large soft rounds baked on a girdle (griddle) over the fire and cut into wedges, which is why the triangle is still the expected shape. Oven scones raised with chemical leaven, like this one, belong to the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when packaged baking powder made a quick tea bread possible in any household kitchen. The recipe's appearance in a Royal Baking Powder booklet is worth noting: these free and cheap collections were advertising for the sponsor's product. The eggs and sugar mark it as a richer, more American-style scone than the plain Scottish original, closer to a sweet biscuit than to a girdle bannock.