Oven Scones
4 cupfuls flour. 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 tablespoonful sugar ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar 1 egg Sweet milk Rub Crisco finely into flour, add sugar, salt, soda, and cream of tar- Beat egg, put half of it into cup, then with one-half and some sweet milk make other ingredients into soft dough. Knead very little on floured baking board, divide into five pieces, make them smooth and roll out, not too thinly, cut them into four small cakes. Lay them on a Criscoed tin, brush over with remaining egg and bake in hot oven ten minutes. A few currants or raisins may be added if liked.
Sufficient for twenty small scones.
Breads, etc.
A plain scone raised with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder, from the era when Crisco was being promoted as a substitute for lard and butter. The written-out quantity of flour has not survived in this text, so the proportions have to be reasoned from the yield.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity is given, though it is the bulk of the dough. For twenty small scones with 5 tablespoons of fat, something in the region of 1 lb (about 4 cups) of flour would fit the yield; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original figure.
- Soda and cream of tartar1 teaspoon soda with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and it starts working the moment the milk goes in. Mix, shape and bake without delay; roughly 4 teaspoons of commercial baking powder is the usual equivalent and is more forgiving of a pause.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. Ten minutes suits scones rolled a good half-inch thick, as "not too thinly" implies.
- Sweet milkSweet milk simply means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk. Whole milk, added a little at a time until the dough just holds, is what is wanted.
- CriscoCrisco is a vegetable shortening, originally hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Rub it in cold as you would butter; the recipe's "rub finely" gives a tender, cakey crumb rather than a flaky one.
- The salt1½ teaspoons of salt against roughly a pound of flour is on the assertive side but not out of range for a scone eaten with butter. Reduce to 1 teaspoon if the flour is self-rising or the butter salted.
- ShapingFive pieces each cut into four gives twenty scones, matching the stated yield. The recipe says only "four small cakes" and specifies neither the size of the rounds nor the shape of the cuts. Handle the dough as little as the recipe says; kneading develops gluten and toughens them.
- Egg washHalf the beaten egg goes into the dough, half is brushed on top. Reserve it before adding milk to the cup, or you will lose track of the split.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s, shortly after the company introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a shortening, and it is frankly a promotional book: the recipes call for Crisco throughout, and the tins are "Criscoed" rather than greased. Scones themselves are much older and Scottish in origin, traditionally baked on a griddle; the oven scone, as the title here distinguishes it, is the later domestic-range version. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is a survival from before packaged baking powder became universal, and the pairing of two teaspoons acid to one of soda seems to have been a common household ratio.