Search Results for: scones

Most days I’m one of those cynics who thinks the local foods movement is overdone. Oversold, over-hyped, overwrought…over pretty much everything. But today is not one of those days. Why? Because this morning I opened up a glass bottle of locally-produced cream and found this:

Reader Anna wrote in late last week to ask why big heat (i.e. around 500 degrees Fahrenheit) helps shortbread-type cakes like scones and American biscuits rise higher. Anna, you’ve made me a very happy blogger this Monday morning. Leavening is a fascinating, fascinating subject.

That’s an awfully difficult question to answer. There’s no question that scones are descendants of Scottish oat and/or barley cakes. The word is actually Scottish in origin. “Skons” is how they pronounce them up that way. “Skoans” is the pronunciation I mostly heard down in Devon and Cornwall.

The barley cakes of old weren’t polite little circular scones like they have all over Britain today. A couple of hundred years ago they were made in one large, flat round which was placed on a hot griddle and flipped, sort of like a huge pancake. The finished cake was then cut into big wedges which were then buttered and eaten hot.

The residents of Devon and Cornwall don’t agree on much generally, but least of all where food is concerned. A couple of years ago I discussed the ongoing row between those two English counties on the crucial question of pasty crimping: side or top? With issues of that magnitude on the table it’s no wonder there’s so little intermarriage across county lines down that way.

Something else that’s interesting about Picardy is that they have their own language: Picard. Some consider it a distinct language, others just a dialect of French. But so I’m told, speakers of Picard and French can’t necessarily understand one another.

In our modern education environment where we take French, German and Spanish classes, it’s easy to forget that Europe — despite its best efforts to integrate itself into an economic, even cultural whole — remains a patchwork of cultures and languages, many that the average person has never heard of. The big, internationally accepted tongues are merely language of convenience which (supposedly) tie everyone together.

The Pastry clan went to a big Epiphany party Saturday night, the official observance of the feast day at one of the two parishes we participate in (one’s a bit closer to our home, the other to our hearts). Since the church has a sizable hispanic population, I fully expected to find some king cakes there, and sure enough I wasn’t disappointed. There were several, both a rosca de reyes…