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Scotch Scones
Make the preceding mixture for tea cakes, but shape with a small round cooky cutter. Bake on a griddle, turning on both sides until a delicate brown. Lay a napkin on a plate, arrange the scones on it and fold the corners of the napkin over them. Split and butter while hot.
GRAHAM GEMS, No. I-Into a cup of freshly sifted graham flour stir one cup of new milk; add salt, beat well, and pour into hot gem-tins which have been well greased, and bake in a hot oven. Do not add more flour if you wish the gems to be satisfactory. No baking powder is required.
GRAHAM GEMS, No. 2-The following quantities will make one dozen gems of medium size: One teacup of sour milk; one egg; one-half teaspoon of soda; one-half teaspoon of salt; two tablespoons of sugar; one and one-half tablespoons of melted butter; graham flour to thicken. Beat the egg until light, and add to it the milk, sugar, salt, and the soda dissolved in a little cold water. Stir well, adding graham flour sufficient to make a batter so thick that it will not run off the spoon. Lastly add the melted butter, and stir well. Heat the gem-pans, and oil them well, using a little butter placed in a clean cloth, and rubbing it over the pan when heated. Drop enough of the mixture into each space in the pan to a little more than half fill it, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
Three separate items run together on one page: griddle-baked scones that depend on a tea-cake dough printed earlier in the book, and two versions of graham gems. Treat them as three recipes.
- The missing dough"The preceding mixture for tea cakes" is not reproduced here, so the scones cannot be made from this page alone; you would need to turn back to the tea-cake recipe that precedes it.
- Griddle, not ovenThese are girdle scones, cooked on a heavy pan or cast-iron griddle and turned on both sides rather than baked. The recipe gives no timing or pan treatment; moderate heat is safest, since too hot a griddle browns the outside before the centre sets.
- Gem-tinsA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with shallow oval or round cups. Modern muffin tins work, but heat them in the oven first as directed — the preheated, greased metal is what gives gems their crisp shell.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh sweet whole milk, as opposed to milk that has soured or had cream skimmed. In Gems No. 1 it matters that it is sweet, since there is no leavening at all: the rise comes entirely from steam in a very hot pan.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 425–450F. Gems No. 1 in particular needs the upper end, since steam is doing all the work.
- Graham flourGraham flour is whole-wheat flour with the bran left coarse; stone-ground whole wheat is the closest current equivalent. The book insists on not adding more flour to Gems No. 1, though it gives no reason; graham flour is slow to absorb liquid, so a batter that seems thin at first may thicken as it stands.
- Sour milk and sodaGems No. 2 relies on acid to activate the half teaspoon of soda. Cultured buttermilk or plain yogurt thinned with milk gives a reliable acidity; today's pasteurised milk left to sour does not.
- "Flour to thicken"Deliberately unquantified. For one teacup (about 3/4 cup) of sour milk plus an egg, expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of graham flour to reach a batter that will not run off the spoon.
- YieldGems No. 2 makes a dozen medium gems, as the recipe states; Gems No. 1, with only a cup of flour, should make six to eight. The scone yield depends entirely on the size of the batch of tea-cake dough, which is not given here.
Scones cooked on a griddle rather than in an oven are generally taken to be the older Scottish form, from a time when a good deal of home baking was done on a girdle over the fire; the oven-risen wedge is the later development. Folding the corners of the napkin over the scones would also have helped hold the steam in and keep the split, buttered scones soft on the way to the table. The graham gems alongside them belong to a different tradition: "graham" flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and diet reformer of the 1830s who argued for coarse unsifted wheat, and by the date of this book his name had become a plain shelf label. Gems were a common American quick bread of the late nineteenth century, and the fact that No. 1 uses nothing but flour, milk and salt shows how much a well-heated cast-iron pan was trusted to do on its own.