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Singing Hinnies
I lb. (4 cups) flour 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) butter 1/2 pint (I cup) cleaned ½ teaspoonful salt Cream currants Sieve the flour and salt into a basin, rub the butter finely into it, then add the currants and make into a soft dough with some cream. Roll out rather thin, cut out with a round cutter, and bake on a hot griddle.
These cakes owe their name to the fact that they make a singing noise when being cooked.
A Northumbrian girdle cake set among the puddings. The text is lightly garbled by transcription — the ingredient column runs into the method — but the proportions are recoverable.
- The ingredient list, untangled1 lb (4 cups) flour, 6 oz (3/4 cup) butter, 1/2 pint (1 cup) cleaned currants, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and cream to mix. "Cream" is a stray line from the ingredients, not an instruction to cream the butter.
- How much creamThe original gives no quantity — it says only "some cream." Expect somewhere between 1 and 1 1/4 cups of single or heavy cream to bring 1 lb of flour to a soft dough. Add it in stages; the dough should be soft but still rollable, closer to scone than to batter.
- No raising agentMany recipes for this cake include a teaspoon or two of baking powder, or soda with sour cream. This one has none, so the result will be denser and more biscuit-like than a risen hinny. That is a choice the book has made, not an omission you must correct, but it is worth knowing before you commit a pound of flour.
- Griddle heat"Hot" here is likely to mean moderate by frying standards: a heavy pan over medium heat, or roughly 350-375F on an electric griddle. Too hot and the outside colours before the centre sets; allow several minutes a side, turned once, and judge by colour.
- Grease the griddle, lightlyTraditionally the girdle was rubbed with a scrap of suet or lard rather than buttered. Butter on the surface will burn at this heat and blacken the currants that sit proud of the dough.
- Roll thickness"Rather thin" here need not mean wafer thin; something around 1/4 inch, cut with a round cutter of about 3 inches, is a reasonable reading.
- The singingThe noise comes from butter and moisture in the dough hitting the hot iron. It is a useful signal: a silent griddle is too cool, and a violently spitting one is too hot.
- Yield and servingThe count depends entirely on how thick you roll and how wide the cutter is; expect a large batch from this quantity. Split while hot and butter them; like most griddle cakes they are best the day they are made.
Singing hinnies belong to Northumberland and the Durham coalfield, where they were cooked on a girdle (griddle) hung over the fire rather than in an oven — a practical matter in houses without reliable baking ovens. "Hinny" is a Northumbrian and Tyneside term of endearment, a dialect form of "honey", and the name is generally read as an affectionate one for the cake itself; the explanation the book gives for the "singing" — the sizzle of fat on hot iron — is the one usually offered, though the book itself says only that the cakes sing. The richness here is notable: cream rather than milk, and a generous weight of butter, where the everyday version of the cake was made with lard and whatever liquid was to hand. Its appearance under "Pudding Recipes" rather than among breads reflects an older, looser sense of pudding as anything sweet-ish served at the end of a meal or with tea.