Scones for Dinner!

Once upon a time, about 120 years or so ago, my Great-Grandmother wrote down her recipe for scones.

My GG was a true Scotswoman, born in Dunvegan, Ontario, where it is said aloud that "They're more Scots than the Scots."

She had a husband and two boys to feed. Somehow this is the only family recipe that came down to us. 

My guess is that Grandpa absolutely loved his mother's scones, and that he got her to write it down for him, or perhaps one of his mother's friends would have given it to him - I'm not sure how old he was when she passed away. And Grandpa was a real "man," never set foot in a kitchen, so the actual mechanics of how we got the recipe in the first place are a mystery. But I'm still convinced he was the venue of transmission somehow, since there were no daughters.

Like any armchair-anthropologist, I wonder what her life was like, and have sat contemplating her recipe, looking for clues.

1 quart flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
A piece of butter the size of an egg, rubbed into flour
3 eggs well beaten
1 cup milk

The first thing I notice is the sheer quantity - double that of any modern recipe I've seen for scones. Ah - two growing boys and a man to feed - I'm guessing these disappeared pretty quickly so she doubled an older recipe.

I notice the absence of salt, and at first I wondered if salt was hard to come by. But if she had a cup of sugar to throw into this, she was able to get ingredients. So then I think, the fat was salty. And why so little of it? Modern recipes use 1/3 cup fat to 2 cups flour.

And, everybody wants to know, what on earth is "Rubbed in flour?"

My wonderful 91-year old friend I explained it to me the first time I tried to make them. She said to take a bit of fat and flour together in your hand and rub it together as if you were feeling a fine piece of material.

I remember how it felt after the first time I'd done that. I stood there, looking at this bowl full of flour, with no visible fat, and all the flour looking slightly granular. I had never been able to get such airy texture into a mix before. "Rubbed into flour" was the answer to scones, to pastry, and to shortbread!

I see she used eggs partly as leaveners, because I put 4 teaspoons of baking powder into only 2 cups of flour. And that's my last clue - she, or the men she was cooking for, preferred their scones to have a light, cake-like texture.

In a modern or traditional scone recipe, there is no sugar, and only 1/4 - 1/3 cup of liquid for 2 cups of flour. So she went waaayyyyy over the top with 3 eggs and a cup of milk! That explains the sugar. It's cake. It looks like scones, but it's cake.

Real scones, traditional scones, are hard lumps. Figures - it comes from Scotland, after all! They were starving! Everything they could make was hard, all ingredients out of their price range.

So when they landed in Canada in the 19th century, and they were able to buy tenderizing ingredients like milk and sugar and eggs, they "fixed" their traditional recipes to make light, sweet scones that are a treasure to eat.

My reminiscing about GG's scones has been brought about because we thought the recipe was lost.

See, in the 1980's, my Stepmother M was given the original recipe card by my Grandma. Grandma had made several copies of the recipe, and M just loved it because of the connection with my dad's family. She was delighted when Grandma gave her the original. I was given a copy too, though I had my head in the clouds and had never so much as opened a can of beans.

Fast forward a few years, and there I was married to S, an Irishman, who wanted me to make scones, sighing long and loud over his mother's lost recipe. So I dug mine out, asked my friend I what "rubbed into flour" meant, and the family recipe was reborn up here.

Hubby S, being a computer guy, insisted I get the recipe onto a computer, so I built a recipe database in Filemaker, and my GG's recipe for scones was the very first one committed to the safety of the digital world.

But I didn't back up my computer, and I had a crash: not a software crash, a whole set of shelves was pulled over and my computer fell from a height of six feet onto the floor, while running. The heads jammed deep into the drive. S did his best and actually recovered a lot of the data.

But the recipe database was gone.

But that was okay, because I still had the handwritten copy my Grandmother had made.

Or did I? Sure enough, I didn't. Even then, I wasn't heartbroken, because I remembered it! So I kept making them, at least once a month.

And then I left Hubby. :-( 

Not only did I not have a family to bake for, I couldn't afford the ingredients any more. Faced with the day-to-day difficulties of keeping my head above water, I managed to forget the recipe.

Several years ago, when Daughter and I went down to Louisiana to visit my Stepmom and Daddy, my Stepsister D and I ransacked the house (as quietly as we could!) and went through all of my Stepmom's recipes and books, looking for the scones recipe. To no avail.

But last night Stepsister called me. She had been going through one of Mother's handbags and come across a small notebook. Yes, the recipe was there.

In her handbag! Bless her heart, she'd been carrying it around, basically on her person, for at least 30 years!

I'm very impressed! And absolutely thrilled that Stepsister found it, and once again left shaking my head in wonder at the generations before mine who simply will not throw anything out!

I mean, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't walk around with my mother's purse on my arm! So I wouldn't have saved it in the first place. I might have looked briefly at a notebook...I hope I would have! But when I get into my mind that things have to GO, well, get outta my way or you're gonna get hurt, buddy!

And other times, I am unable to throw away a single piece of fabric, an single piece of paper, because I am paralyzed with fear that I will lose something irreplaceable by doing so.

Well, all my faults aside, I am so thankful this recipe has been found by someone who is careful and thorough, who has managed to return to me a part of my heritage that was briefly lost.

There will be scones for dinner tonight!