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Cream Scones
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 teaspoonfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs 1/3 cupful cream 1 white of egg Mix and sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder. Rub in Crisco with finger tips, add eggs well beaten and cream. Knead dough lightly on floured baking board, divide into four equal pieces, make smooth and roll out, Breads, etc. and cut into 4 small scones. beaten white of egg and fry always be lightly handled.
Lay them on hot griddle, brush over with slowly on both sides. The dough should Sufficient for sixteen scones. 1/3 cupful sugar 1/3 cupful Crisco 1/3 cupful molasses 2 eggs
A griddle scone rather than an oven one — closer to a Scottish girdle scone or a bannock than to the tall baked scones sold today. The dough is soft and the handling is the whole trick.
- The flour is not statedThe ingredient list gives fat, leavening, sugar, salt, eggs and cream but no flour quantity, though the method calls for it to be sifted with the dry goods. Judging by 3 teaspoons of baking powder, roughly 2 cups of flour is the usual proportion for a dough of this size; add it gradually until the dough just holds together.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to remove trans fats. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives more flavour and a slightly softer crumb.
- Rub in with fingertipsWork the shortening into the flour quickly until it looks like coarse meal, and stop there. Warm hands melt the fat into the flour and the scones come out tough and dense rather than flaky.
- Handle lightlyThe line about the dough always being lightly handled is the hinge of the recipe. Knead only enough to bring it together — a dozen folds at most — then roll and cut without re-rolling scraps more than once.
- Griddle, not ovenThese are cooked on a hot griddle or heavy skillet, ungreased or barely greased, and turned once. The recipe gives no temperature and asks only that they be fried slowly on both sides: too hot and the outside colours before the centre sets, so keep the heat moderate and allow several minutes a side for scones about half an inch thick.
- The egg washThe recipe has the scones laid on the hot griddle first and brushed with beaten egg white there, giving a thin glazed skin. On a griddle it sets rather than browns, so expect gloss rather than colour.
- Cutting and yieldThe dough is divided into four, each piece rolled and cut into four — the traditional wedge cut, four farls from a round. Sixteen small scones as written, best eaten the day they are made.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with an unfamiliar product: a shortening made from cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation, sold in a can rather than cut from a lard tub. The book worked by putting Crisco into every dish a household already knew, which is why a Scottish griddle scone turns up in a manufacturer's pamphlet — the point is not the scone but the substitution. Griddle-cooked scones predate oven baking in the domestic kitchen and were the older form in Scotland and northern England, where a flat iron girdle hung over the fire; the split into four wedges, still called farls, comes from that tradition. The enrichment with cream and whole eggs makes this a richer version than the plain everyday kind.