The mutant scones
"Hi Grandma, it's me, Manuela, I'm calling from Paris! What's our recipe for scones again?"
This story begins with a grandmother in Barcelona, her granddaughter in Paris, and the recipe for a small type of quick bread of Scottish origin and often eaten round those parts in a cream tea. They are a staple for ladies who lunch, a category my grandmother definitely falls into. In any event, far from being forgotten forever more, that seemingly innocent phone call opened the can of my suspicions and revealed a side of my grandmother that I would never have imagined. It wasn't that I didn't know her well. On the contrary, I've been studying her closely since I wore my hair in bunches: the songs she'd hum distractedly, her differing tones of voice according to the language she was speaking, the way she'd dress for each occasion, the perfumes to match her every mood, her vintage garments and the story behind each, the signature dishes she'd make when she wanted a certain success... A legend such as my grandmother requires peculiarities; what's strange is that I hadn't realised that earlier.
It's important to know that my grandmother is a superlative chef and an even better baker. She just loves cooking! And her pleasure is complete when she perfectly presents her dishes on the tables she lays to wine and dine her guests. Now that is a real art! Her staging would befit any Wes Anderson film: lighting, music, rhythm, photography, characters, scripts, special effects... everything counts when it comes to setting a table. But that's another story. In a nutshell, she makes food fit for angels, as behoves an outstanding student of Le Cordon Bleu, and to the best of her ability she has endeavoured to pass on her passion to me.
Anyway, as I was saying, scones are often eaten with tea, and as my grandmother was forever inviting people round for afternoon tea, she would ring me up to request a helping hand. I'm fairly sure she didn't actually need it (my grandmother has always had a lot of home help), but it made me feel rather indispensable. So for the first few years I lived in Barcelona, from a very early age, I would bake scones with her. We would make the dough and roll it out, and my special job was to cut out each scone with the cutter and place them on the baking tray. Once we had taken them out and arranged them on her Limoges porcelain plates, she would make a little parcel for me, deliciously wrapped, that I would carry home to share and that always arrived open and somewhat lighter than when I departed.
When I moved away some years later we continued the tradition, less religiously but with the same love. Every summer when I came back to Barcelona to stay with them we would bake together.
That famous Parisian Christmas a few years ago, I was planning to invite my friends for afternoon tea just like my grandmother, so I rang her to get the recipe.
"Hi Grandma, it's me, Manuela, I'm calling from Paris! How are you? It's been a while... etc. etc. ... What's our recipe for scones again?"
After a moment's silence she began to recite the quantities to me and I jotted them down in a notebook (I never go anywhere without one - they're my second brain and I go through them at lightning speed. I never throw them away either because they are filled with memories, ideas, stories, drawings, designs, friends... they're an extension of my hand). Naturally, my scones didn't turn out as good as hers but that's only to be expected - her hands are magical and ingredients vary significantly from one place to another.
Months later, this time from Melbourne, I called her again, more really to hear her voice, but with the added excuse of needing the recipe again for another afternoon tea.
She sighed and proceeded to run through it. I jotted it down again in yet another notebook, and once again they weren't as good as hers. They were nothing like the ones I'd made in Paris either, but once again I put it down to differences in local ingredients.
By coincidence, a few days later I was looking through my notebooks for the address of a wonderful antique shop that some friends from Madrid had opened in Melbourne, when I came across the first scone recipe I'd written down in Paris. At first I skipped over it, but after turning a few more pages I went back. The quantities were in grams; the Melbourne recipe was measured in cups. That's weird. I put the two notebooks side by side and compared the recipes. They were completely different. Even accounting for the variation in measuring, the quantities weren't proportional. I decided to cross-check so I called her back.
- Sorry grandma, I know you just gave me the recipe the other day but I'm in the shop right now and I haven't got it on me.
She told me again. A third and entirely new version!
That was how I found out that my grandmother, in her greatness, has this very particular trait: her recipes are as closely guarded as the formula for Coca-Cola and nobody can ever know them because nobody should make them as well as she does. So she adds ingredients, leaves them out, changes the quantities... how I kick myself that I can't go back to my childhood to pinch her recipes for scones and all the other things she made with me in the kitchen without fear of being discovered.
I was a little hurt at first that my beloved grandmother kept secrets from me or saw me as a potential rival of her meticulous art, but I accepted it as one of the traits of her personality and unique character.
And because I wanted to look at it lovingly, as she deserves, I decided to make the most of that trait. Over the years I've collected at least a dozen scone recipes, each one different to the rest, and I've paired them with the cities where I was when I called her to get them. The Morocco recipe has cinnamon in, London is brown sugar, Buenos Aires clove, Budapest is lemon zest, Prague has orange, Milan oats or rye, I can't remember ... I have all the versions and I'm still calling her for more, each one singular and none hers exactly. I'm pretty sure she knows what I'm up to but we've never discussed it because that would force her to confess that she doesn't want to give it up and I don't want to put her on that spot.
This is the latest. I made them last night and they're lovely, but they're not the scones we used to make together. I've never tasted those again. Well actually I have, but only when I go to her house, although she no longer waits for me to bake them together. When she opens the door the smell of freshly baked scones wafts out, and lo and behold they are already sitting fabulously on her divine Limoges plates on the coffee table.
Scones recipe
Ingridients:
- 2 cups of flour
- 4 tea spoons of baking powder
- 1 tea spoon of salt
- 1/3 cup of butter
- 2/3 cup of milk
Instructions:
Lightly mix the ingredients to form a tender dough. Knead gently on a board. Stretch the dough 2 cm thick. Cut the dough into rounds of 4cm in diameter (I use a cup) Place the pasta in a tray dusted with flour and bake at 230º.