Category Archives: Pastry

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.

Baking powder doesn’t look much like an explosive, but that’s how I think of it: a cocktail of chemicals that creates a high volume of outward-rushing gas — literally “blowing up” a mass of batter or dough. Add a little water and a little heat and kablooie, you get volume.

The sad part is that baked things don’t achieve anything like the volume they could achieve, at least in theory. For batters and doughs are imperfect vessels. They leak a lot in the oven. Even choux batter leaks, despite the fact that it increases in volume by about 400% as it bakes. It’s not bad, but still well short of the 160,000% increase in volume you get when water converts into steam. That choux batter can rise even four times is a testament to the gummy, elastic network of gluten and gelatinized starch you get when you pre-cook a flour paste.

Scone or biscuit dough is nowhere near as well endowed. It’s a loose, dry-ish paste chock full of butter. Which means the gluten it contains is largely undeveloped. Coated with fat as most of those protein molecules are, they can’t attach to one another to form the stretchy gas-trapping networks they normally would, poor little things.

Thus instead of an efficient gas-trapping hot air balloon-like device we have a structure that more closely resembles a hot air balloon full of holes the size of dinner plates, gushing steam and gasses in all directions. Inflating it requires less a steady stream of leavening than an explosion. Which is where the chemical leavening and the high heat come in.

As you may recall from other discussions of baking powder, it has two actions (it’s “double-acting”, remember?) one when it gets wet and another when it gets hot. The faster you can get heat to penetrate the scone or the biscuit, the higher the volume of gas and steam you’ll release all at once. Thus the high oven. Pop the little cakes in and FOOM, off goes the baking powder and up go the scones. In this way we see that scones or biscuits are less like one of these than it is one of these.

Sure, they’ll still rise at lower heat, just not as much. And some people prefer a denser scone with a more refined appearance than you often get from, well, an explosion. But where American biscuits are concerned, lightness is a characteristic valued above all others. So I say…ka-boom.

Had another email mishap over the weekend. I lost about a week’s worth. So if you sent me something and didn’t get a reply, please try again. I promise not to be so clumsy until the next time it happens.

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.

If that sounds awfully like an American scone, you’d be right. Ours are large and wedge-shaped though we bake them these days instead of griddle them. So it seems that at least from an historical standpoint American scones are closer to the way the Scots originally prepared them. Does that make them necessarily better? The answer, because “authenticity” is a non-word in the Joe Pastry lexicon, is no.

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.

Lately they’ve been feuding over Devon’s attempt to secure Protected Designation of Origin status (called a PDO, like a French AOC or Italian DOC) for the Devon cream tea. Folks in Devon claim it’s necessary in order to protect a ritual that’s been native to the area for nigh on 1,000 years. The Cornish say the application is all about sour grapes over the fact they managed to secure a PDO for clotted cream before Devon.

That may be, but there seems to be strong evidence that the building blocks of the modern cream tea existed in Devon as far back as 1,000 years ago. It’s true that tea didn’t arrive in England until the mid-1600′s. Still manuscripts found at Devon’s Tavistock Abbey that date to the late 900′s show that abbey monks fed laborers with bread slathered with clotted cream and strawberry preserves.

Where did the scones come in? Not until later. How much later is probably impossible to say, though it’s a safe bet that Devonish types adopted the scone well before the Cornish. Even in my day, some 25 years ago now, you could still stay at a Cornish B&B and wake up to a traditional Cornish “split”, basically a yeast-raised roll that was the basis of the Cornish cream tea until very recently.

But the question remains: is it possible to get a PDO for a cream tea? Usually those sorts of designations are reserved for things like wines and cheeses, not so much for an arrangement of component foods. But there’s no question that it’s game of them to try. Whatever happens I think they can at least some consolation that in much of the world (certainly here in the States) the cream tea will always be synonymous with Devon.

“The Great Googa Mooga” is going to hit Prospect Part in Brooklyn this weekend, a sort of Lollapalooza of food with music attached. You know “food-tainment” is pushing the boundaries of, well, taste when star chefs, pricey appetizers, wine and hog butchery can draw crowds on a rock n’ roll scale. Livy, the Roman historian, famously remarked that the glorification of chefs was a sign of a culture in decline. I hope that was one of his throwaway lines, otherwise I’m deeply concerned with the plight of Western civilization. Thanks to reader Catherine for the hat tip!

Reader Mark asks:

Any chance you’d be able to expand on what clotted cream is, and why it doesn’t seem to be something that can be purchased in the US? Is it practical to make at home? Just doesn’t seem one can have a proper scone w/out some clotted cream to go with it.

I would be delighted, Mark! Most people think they call it “clotted” cream because that’s the way your arteries look when a Devon creamy tea is over. I’m not saying that isn’t true, but it’s not technically correct. “Clotted” cream is made via a process that’s unique to Devon, Cornwall and a few regions of southern Asia and the Middle East (where the end product is known as Malai or Kaymak). But how exactly does it work?

Well all know that milk, given time, will separate into cream and whole milk (or so). Yet some particularly rich creams, given time, can further separate into heavy clots and liquid. You’ve probably seen this in action in cartons of whipping cream, where semi-firm blobs will sometimes come plopping out of the container (it’s not spoiled, it’s just “clotted”). Homogenization interferes with clotting, however, which is why we only see these cream lumps incidentally.

Actively encouraging the clots is a simple and time consuming process that’s fascinating to watch (I saw it done once at a farm in Devon, and the results nearly made a West Country farmer out of me). First, a few gallons of fresh, unpasteurized milk are poured into shallow copper pans. Then the pans are floated over cauldrons of boiling water until they reach a temperature of 190 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point they’re removed from the heat and allowed to cool very slowly. This process has the effect of both speeding the rise of fat globules to the surface and melting them together, so when they cool they form a thick layer on top of the milk that’s skimmed off before the process is repeated.

Depending on how long the pans are left out to cool, a certain amount of bacterial action occurs, and this has the effect of rendering the cream slightly tangy. Combine that with the nutty flavors that heating process brings out, not to mention the richness produced by an astounding 65% milk fat content (heavy whipping cream is 30%) and the result is Elysium on a scone. These rough edges are of course what make true Devon or Cornish cream impossible to come by in the States, in the same way that real French cheeses are both geographically and legally out of our reach.

But airfares are cheap nowadays, and there’s nothing like the fresh air of the West Country to put the pink back in your cheeks. Remember as you’re making reservations: two seats will be required for the return journey.

Quick: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone says the word “scone”? Other than sawdust, I mean. Right: English tea. Or more specifically, the ritual of English afternoon tea. Erroneously called “high tea” here in the States (probably because of the formality that’s associated with it), the meal is actually, technically, “low tea.”

Oh blast those infernal Brits and their fussy, high falutin’ terms! Yet the words do have a specific meaning, and unlike what we Colonials think, they have nothing to do with the status of the meal. Rather they have to do with the location at which they’re taken. “High” tea is taken at the “high”, i.e. “main” table, the dining table. “Low” tea is taken, well, pretty much anywhere else.

The tradition can be traced back as far as the 1760′s among the British gentry, where it was thought to be a kind of stop-gap meal between lunch and the “high” meal, which typically took place around eight. Yet it really didn’t come into its own until the mid-1800′s, the golden age of British rule in the far East, when the so-called “Orientalist” craze that swept the Commonwealth. British afternoon tea, some say, may be an Anglified version of the Japanese tea ceremony.

There are as many afternoon tea traditions as there are counties in Britain. Yet one of the most famous is that which occurs the county where I once lived: Devon. There, afternoon tea was called “cream tea”, and well, you can pretty much imagine what went on. Devon is rich and rolling farm country, known for its dairy herds, which are said to produce a higher fat milk than is typical in the rest of the British Isles. Dairy folk in Devon make a one-of-a-kind indulgence out of it, known as “double” or “clotted” cream. It’s thick as mud, the perfect sinful spread for a scone.

I can still remember the gluttonous joy of those teas: split the scone, slather on the cream, add a dollop of jam for color, extend the pinky and…madly stuff the whole thing into your mouth. People have been doing that as long as there’s been tea in Devon. Of course they do the same thing just down the coast in Cornwall, only there they put the cream on top of the jam instead of the other way around. Animals.

Last week it was MCA of the Beastie Boys, this week a legend from another generation went down. The man was Donald “Duck” Dunn, who was second only to the great James Jamerson in the pantheon of R&B bass players. But whereas Jamerson was the house bassist for Motown Records, Dunn held down the low end down in Memphis at Stax.

Artists from those labels dominated the soul scene in the 1960′s, but whereas Motown leaned more toward the polished and the funky (Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Jackon 5), the Stax sound was raw and all about gospel and blues roots. Memphis soul, in other words. Notables from the 60′s Stax heyday included Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett. Dunn backed all of them as part of the Stax house band, Booker T. & the M.G.’s (which recorded plenty of hits in its own right).

Most people know Donald Duck Dunn as the pipe-smoking bassist from The Blues Brothers. Indeed he and fellow Booker T. & The MG’s alumnus Steve Cropper both played in the Saturday Night Live house band in the early days. Here they both are backing the Blues Brothers live (Steve Cropper wasn’t in the movie). Appropriately the bass is way up front in the mix, making it easier to appreciate Dunn’s contribution.

Quite a coup it was for Belushi and Akroyd to have landed those two ringers as part of their act. Quite an irony it must have been for Dunn to have helped write and recorded these classic tracks, only to see them butchered by a couple of clowns! Then again there’s no denying what the Blues Brothers did to popularize R&B generally.

So so long Donald Duck Dunn, we hardly knew ye. Thanks for everything you did to help make Memphis sound so sweet. And thanks for all the great bass riffs that I spent hours and hours copying as a kid, hoping to one day grow up and master.

UPDATE: Reader Lyle points out that I neglected to mention that Levon Helm also died last week. Very true, and a terrible omission on mympart. Helm was also a Stax recording artist and a cornerstone of The Band. He will be missed!