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FARE OF THE COUNTRY
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January 5, 1992
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Section 5, Page
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IN Scotland the scone isn't just a quick tea bread, it's a national institution, and as such a legitimate target for home-grown humor. A cartoon strip this August in the national newspaper The Scotsman, for instance, depicts panic in the Highlands as the local people learn that there will be no more money available for museums devoted to the history of the scone as foodstuff and metaphor through the ages.
But the fact is that Scottish foods have a celebrated place in the country's history and literature. A whole school of 19th-century Scottish fiction is named for the kailyard -- Scottish for cabbage patch -- and scones have a much longer, more distinguished pedigree. Boswell ate scones as he toured the Hebrides with Dr. Johnson (he thought them very good, but couldn't understand how the Highlanders could eat them with cheese for breakfast). In "Kidnapped," David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart, fleeing the Redcoats, "lay upon the bare top of a rock like scones upon a girdle" (girdle is Scottish for griddle). As for the poet Robert Burns, "souple scones" were "the wale of food" -- wale meaning simply "the best."
Although the English eat scones mainly at teatime, the Scots eat them at almost any time: with midmorning coffee, with soup and salad at lunch, at afternoon tea or high tea, and even with a glass of wine at the co*cktail hour. Schoolchildren eat treacle scones (made with spices and molasses added to the basic white flour), as they swing along the street with their book bags, and commuters buy scones, the way New Yorkers might buy bagels, as they rush for their trains in Glasgow's Central Station.
Ask where the name scone came from, and you may be unwittingly caught up in a local controversy. Many dictionaries -- even the Scottish National Dictionary -- say the root word is schoonbrot, from a Middle Dutch word meaning fine bread, but a number of Scottish food historians reject that theory, and opt for the Gaelic word sgonn. Macalpine's Gaelic-English dictionary defines sgonn as "gulp, glut, eat in large mouthfuls." In "The Scots Kitchen," first published in 1929, F. Marian McNeill, doyenne of Scottish food writers, accepts sgonn as the root but defines it as "a shapeless mass."
Well, some scones are shapeless masses, but most are not. Those made from dough cut with a biscuit cutter come out round, and raised to about twice the thickness of the unbaked dough, which is usually rolled out to three-quarters to one inch. Traditional cooks prefer to grasp a handful of dough and place it on the baking tray, continuing the process until the dough is used up, a method that does produce a rather shapeless mass. Still other cooks pat the scone dough into a pie shape, place it on a hot griddle and cut it into wedges for serving. This method, said Catherine Brown, author of "Broths to Bannocks" (John Murray), a history of three centuries of Scottish cooking, is like that used for Irish soda scones. Both the Irish and the Scottish versions are made with flour, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk, cooked on a griddle, and served in wedges.
Shape, though, isn't the main issue with scones. Texture (they should be crumbly but somewhat moist, slightly dense but not grainy, flaky but not powdery) and flavor (any flavorings used should be subtle and compatible with butter and jam) are the real tests. Biting into a scone should not release a shower of crumbs onto your clothing or the tablecloth, but neither should you have to do any serious chewing. And freshly baked scones should taste good even without the layers of butter, thick cream and strawberry jam that the Scots (and the English) like to heap on them.
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