A Dyke A Broad #106 The Scone Edition
In which I go online for a recipe, and somewhat regret it.
While most of the people I know are perched in front of their screens waiting to see what hijinks U.S. voters get up to next, I’m thinking about food. In particular scones.
The other day, I wanted to recreate those cranberry pecan scones I baked a couple years ago which were so good that eating just one with a nice strong cup of coffee (or glass of bubbly prosecco) would make you think everything will suddenly work out—bombs will quit falling in Ukraine, the environment quit burning, politicians and activists everywhere will foreswear stupidity (and attacks on abortion clinics and defenseless art), the sick pick up their beds and walk.
I made the mistake of going online and googling “best scone recipe.” After the algorithms offered me approximately 33,900,000 to choose from, I finally settled on the third on the list with a 4.8 score out of 5 and hundreds of positive reviews, nearly everybody agreeing, this recipe really did produce the best scones.
Still, I’m not sure why I chose it. I knew I wasn’t going to follow all the steps, so what was the point? I wasn’t even going to follow most of them. Not just because I increasingly hate rules, hate people pointing their digital fingers at me and telling me how to do things. But because I can’t. I don’t have the equipment or ingredients or space. Not to mention the patience to do things I know are trendy, but not at all necessary—like grating frozen butter.
Which is never going to happen. First of all, because I live in a small apartment in which the freezer tucked into the under-the-counter fridge is far too tiny to waste an inch of its space on butter, and even if I did keep some there I wouldn’t grate it. Because I always lose a layer of skin from my knuckles when I engage in the unfortunate act, and the last thing I want to do is encourage greasy slivers of butter to combine with my bloody flesh and lodge themselves there in tiny craters where it will no doubt rot.
So while I measured things out—discovering I only had a quarter cup of gritty beige cassonade when it was supposed to be half a cup of white sugar, and adding a bunch of powdered instead—I began to wonder if I picked that recipe simply because I felt pressured by the illusion of that word best. And the internet’s willingness to offer it to me. After all, who sets off in search of mediocrity, second best, the merely delicious, the good enough? In the old days I’d just open up the Joy of Cooking where I’d find exactly one recipe that met my needs, always worked, and tasted really good.
Choosing one out of several million made me nervous. Left me with the sneaking suspicion I’d get it wrong, even if I knew full well that scones were just fancy biscuits—the American kind— and that one scone recipe was almost as good as another. In fact, when I looked at them, many were nearly indistinguishable from each other except for teeny-tiny differences that bloggers and recipe developers emphasized to set them apart in a crowded market, and avoid plagiarism lawsuits. Nevertheless, some got five stars, hundreds or thousands of likes, and paid sponsorships, and some got none.
I like to think that some rare food writers aren’t just out for the popularity and money, but really are artists, entranced by the idea of a perfect recipe, creating something not only worthy of being described by that word best, picking up a blue ribbon at the nearest virtual county fair, but offering to their readers a reproducible, fail-proof path to achieve it that any young anxious baker can follow—as long as they’re equipped with an abundance of kitchen utensils and willingness to spend hours weighing things right down to the milligram, adjusting for air humidity and air and oven temperature.
There aren’t many (any?) sites telling bakers that things will get fucked up, just shrug and go with it. It’s not that big a deal.
Part of the problem is how close the idea of best is to that of only. A kind of censorship that spans all our lives, even this. As if the best way were the only way. As if individual taste plays no role in how we determine either.
Soon, it wasn’t just the technique I doubted, but the proportions. Was I really supposed to add a half a cup of butter? And for that matter, did I get the amount of sugar right?
I do the unthinkable, go back to The Joy of Cooking, and see that by comparison, the recipe online had slightly increased the flour by a few tablespoons, but quadrupled the sugar, doubled the butter, as if we were making cookies not scones.
Experts, of course, in whose interest it is to tell us that they are the only ones who know what best is, and that there’s no leeway for improvising once they come to their decision, nevertheless insist that baking is chemistry and the slightest deviation from their ironclad instructions leads to disaster. When in fact it won’t. Hardly ever does. And not just in the kitchen. There’s more than one way to skin a dyke, get butter in your dough. End discrimination. The world won’t end if you refuse to grate it.
After so many years online, so many opinions imposed, even I strain to remember what’s important, hang on to what I know. Scones, to get back to my baking project, are, in my mind, anyway, not fluffed up cookies. Neither are they some mysterious, foreign thing requiring extra special steps, but only fancy biscuits enriched with eggs and cream. And biscuits, when my grandmother’s mother in Kentucky would have made them, would not have had a precise recipe at all handed down through the generations, but depended instead on how much butter or lard she had left in the house that day. How much flour. Was it, for instance, the end of winter when the cupboards were nearly bare? Was the cow giving milk that you could make butter from, were they lucky enough to have a cow at all? Had they just killed a hog and rendered the fat? Were there at least bacon drippings left in that pan?
Even the temperature of her ingredients, not to mention her wood-fired oven, would have been tough to control. Still, she made do. The biscuits were made and eaten with pleasure and jam by hungry people. The only essential instruction respected, was “Don’t overwork the dough.” Because that makes them tough and bouncy. Oh, and “Don’t get distracted when they’re almost done.” The only thing worse than rubbery is burnt. That dirty diaper can wait. Other than that, you do the best you can with what you have. There’s no shame at all in making do.
In Other News
A new translation of Ovid!
Long fascinating video about the effects of Brexit. Probably no surprises if you were already skeptical about all the promised benefits, but it is still very, very interesting to hear the voices of actual people trying to grapple with the fall-out. From tiny two-people endeavors to large manufacturers.
And here, two updates on Ukraine from British war scholar AKA Professor of Strategic Studies, Phillips O, O’Brien
This Weekend Update is good, too.
Moving on to…
Grim thoughts on climate change, plus the collapse of the Paris agreement just a few years after it was so enthusiastically and proudly signed by so many nations.
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo K
That’s a good idea leaving the paper. I always think that any biscuits are better than no biscuits
I DO grate butter, but like you wish to avoid bloody bits of ME in the scone.
So, I leave the paper wrapper on the bottom two tablespoons and grate the rest.
Does it make a difference?
Well, I'm still the world's worst biscuit baker, so who knows.