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Lobs-Lie-By-The-Fire
I lb. (4 cups) flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar 1/2 pint (I cup) sour milk 1 teaspoonful baking soda Sieve the flour, salt and cream of tartar into a basin. Stir the baking soda into the sour milk, which will cause it to froth, and at once work the dry ingredients to a smooth dough with the effervescing liquid. Dredge the baking-board thickly with flour, turn the mass on it, knead for a moment or two to insure perfect smoothness, dredge a little flour over both dough and rollingpin, and roll out quickly to about one-third of an inch thick. Cut out with a cutter and bake on a hot griddle, turning the scones as they brown on one side. Send to the table piping hot, and eat with butter.
If preferred the dough can be sweetened; again, if wished, a little spice or a few crushed carraway seeds may be introduced as a flavoring.
The same recipe will be found to answer for buttermilk griddles, but in this case the milk employed not being sour, the cakes, of course, would not be "Lobs."
A plain soda scone baked on the griddle rather than in the oven. Two things decide whether it works: the dough must be mixed and cooked while the soda is still fizzing, and the griddle must be at a steady moderate heat so the centre cooks before the outside scorches.
- Work fastThe soda and the acid in the sour milk react on contact, and most of the lift is gone within a few minutes. Have the griddle heating and the board floured before the liquid goes in, and handle the dough as little as possible.
- Sour milkThis means milk that has clabbered naturally, which raw milk did and pasteurised milk does not — modern milk left out simply spoils. Cultured buttermilk is the usual substitute and gives comparable acidity.
- The last sentenceThe closing note is confusing: the likeliest reading is that 'buttermilk griddles' are made with sweet (unsoured) milk, so without an acid liquid the cakes are ordinary griddle cakes rather than the sour-milk kind the recipe calls 'Lobs.'
- Cream of tartar as well as sodaWith genuinely sour milk the cream of tartar acts as insurance against under-acidity; with cultured buttermilk it can probably be left out.
- Liquid is likely shortOne cup of liquid to four cups of flour is unlikely to come together as a rollable dough with modern flour. Expect to add buttermilk a spoonful at a time until it is soft but not sticky.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only 'a hot griddle'; work at a moderate steady heat (around 350-375F on an electric griddle is a reasonable starting point), lightly greased or dusted with flour. Too hot and the outside sets while the inside stays raw; allow roughly 5 minutes a side for third-inch rounds.
- DonenessThe edges should look dry and matte and the scone should feel light for its size. Splitting one open is the surest test; a gummy line through the middle means the heat was too high.
- Yield and servingA pound of flour gives roughly 16–20 scones cut at 2 1/2 inches. They are at their best within an hour of coming off the griddle, split and buttered while hot; after that they toast well but stale quickly.
Lob-lie-by-the-fire is a hearth spirit of English folklore, a brownie who does the household work overnight in exchange for food and warmth by the fire — a figure best known now from Juliana Horatia Ewing's story of that name, serialised in 1873 and published as a book in 1874. Attaching the name to a griddle scone is the kind of nursery joke found in late Victorian and Edwardian cookery books, where homely fireside baking got homely fireside names. The dish itself is the everyday soda scone of Scotland, Ireland and the north of England, cooked on a flat iron girdle over the fire long before most kitchens had a reliable oven. Its logic is that of a household with a milk supply that soured on its own: nothing was wasted, and the acid in yesterday's milk was what made today's bread rise.