N° 8: How to Cook: Scones
You should be able to make these without ever measuring anything. Here's how.
Welcome back. If you’re new here, you might want to open N° 4: How to Cook in the tab next to this one.
Opening Hostilities
Today we’re going to make SCONES together, without any measuring. This isn’t really cooking; it’s baking, and I get it, this thing is called ‘how to cook’. Next time, we’ll learn a couple of life-changing pastas.
The pronunciation of this word gets a bit dicey, but here in England, we generally say ‘Sc-oh-n-es’. ‘O’ like ‘dough’. Some people say ‘scon’ to rhyme with ‘gone’1. That’s fine, too.
I’ve been baking scones from scratch for 25 years. I have never, ever, EVER measured anything, and they have miraculously turned out some shade of brilliant, each and every time.
Once, 15 years ago, I burnt the bottoms due to a spot of bad luck and distraction. I still think about that, because I cut the bottoms off and they were brilliant anyways.
My thinking is essentially that as soon as you have a list of measurements, there’s no way you’ll actually remember the ingredients, or the amounts.
It’s essential to be able to bang this one out off the top of your head at a friend’s house on a Saturday afternoon.
Or, if you end up at a stranger’s place after a handful of pints and some witty banter and feel like impressing them with your whizzo-kitchen-skills the next morning.
The best part is you don’t need to skip through some numpty’s life-story on an online recipe site. And there’s no advertising here either to distract you.
Here’s the recipe:
Set the oven to 180C on the setting with the picture of the fan.
In a big bowl, add:
flour,
butter,
little pinch of salt,
a little baking powder,
and a little more sugar.
Later, you’ll need a bit of milk
Combine dry ingredients, and keep squishing more butter in with your fingers until you get an even mixture the consistency of oatmeal.
If it seems too dry, add more butter, if too fatty, add a bit of flour.
Add just enough milk one little spoon at a time, and mix until when you squish, it just barely stays together. It should still be a wee bit dry, but should squish together.
Roll into a log, flatten, divide in equal parts with a knife, cut triangle shapes, brush with milk, sprinkle with sugar, bake at 180C until golden brown and fluffy and huge.
Set a timer for 14 minutes, because 14 is a better number than 15, and then check how they look.
Try not to burn them.
That’s it.
Maybe read these instructions out loud to yourself now, and then do that again. I want you to be able to make brilliant scones on your first go, after reading this article once.
You’ll have them memorised in no time
Some minor notes:
How much flour? I have no idea. I’d guess for two people you should imagine about twice the amount that fits in your hands cupped together. Do not overthink.
Baking powder: a small, non-invisible amount. A couple of three-fingers-plus-thumb pinchies or so is a good metric. I never even do this to measure. I just dump some in, and nod approvingly at some point. Add too little and they won’t puff up as much as they could; too much and they’ll taste weirdly salty. Again, do not overthink, I just tip a bit in, and away we go.
Sugar: more than above, but remember, you’re putting preserves on these, and ideally clotted cream as well. Don’t make them too sweet.
Butter: Only cowards use unsalted, pasteurised butter. It will work if that’s all you’ve got.
BUT
God’s own butter comes from the north of France, from Normandy. It’s called ‘beurre demi-sel’ and it is fermented (as all butter should be) and never, ever pasteurised, in order to prevent all of the joy being taken out of it2.
Temperature: 180C, (or 350F if you are an American), is a good number to remember. Some wonderful things are baked at this temperature. You can make cookies. You can bake a chicken. You can make scones. I use the setting that has the picture of the fan on it, for circulating, which I find makes the scones floofier, which is to be desired.
Concluding Poetries
Even if your first go isn’t perfect, you have extraordinarily good chances of the results being thoroughly edible if you just use sound judgement, and think about it with regards the notes above. The next round will be better, make no mistake.
Again, I have been doing this for decades and never once measured anything, and never once ended up with inedible scones. You might be the first, but you’re going to have to work pretty hard to end up there. And if you do, you can probably work out for the second batch what went wrong, and the ingredients here are all pretty cheap.
It takes no more than 5 minutes to prep these, and they bake in fifteen minutes.
Remember that the ancients normally just listed the stuff that went in a dish and said ‘it is done’.
Here’s an example of an old recipe found on a cuneiform3 tablet:
“Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”
Good luck. I’m sure this one is fantastic! A great stew is a thing of beauty.
This also reminds me of my grandmother. She wrote lots of recipes like this.
One time, my mother explained her bread recipe to me. “Mary always said just to add flour, salt, water, and starter. That was the extent of her recipe [laughing]. She showed me the rest, but I don’t think there was really much hope of her explaining it”.
Anyways, go live a little.
Apparently, some of these people include the late Queen Elizabeth II. But that’s ok, I never heard her do it, and neither did you.
I here remind you that my Grandmother, whose name was Mary, but who always wanted to go by her middle name, which was Helen, and who went to her grave aged 89 thinking she was 90, randomly reminded people not to do things ‘that took the joy out of their lives’. It was always the most mundane things, and I can still hear her voice in my head saying it. I hope I will always be able to.
It should also be noted that my grandmother made her own butter, and her own cream, and her own sauerkraut, and her own Gołąbki, and grew her own poppies with the seeds of which she made delicious bułeczka and a host of other desserts, while ignoring the fact that the neighbours thought she was on opium, which of course, she wasn’t.
Cuneiform is humanity’s oldest writing system. It’s not a language, but an alphabet, used to write a variety of ancient languages such as Babylonian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Sumerian, and so on. It looks like little chicken-scratchies, and if I recall correctly, can be used both phonetically and pictographically. In any case, the scholars who wrote in these languages were often fluent in several languages and were very clever with inter-lingual puns and references. Asurbanipal had a library at Nineveh, where, btw the Hanging Gardens probably were instead of at Babylon, and he had 30,000 tablets there. Ever keen to prove that he was more than just bashing people on the head and making children…