Do you say scone or scon?
Chatting with Judi Hendricks, author of Bread Alone
Swimming laps at my local Y is where I do my best thinking. There’s something about the smell of bleach, the snap of my swim cap, and the blurred view through my goggles that immediately lowers my blood pressure. Submerging into the cool water, a joyful tingle across my skin, the methodical back and forth; it’s a moving meditation that clears my mind and helps me fit missing pieces of my puzzle together. Recently, I entered the water with a question, hoping the movement would bring an answer. Is there a recipe that I cook more often than any other? Who would I most like to talk to for my first conversation on Ingredient One? There it was, my aha moment – Jen’s Short Scone Recipe from the novel Bread Alone by Judi Hendricks. The main protagonist, Wyn, is going through a terrible divorce so she leaves California and seeks solace in Seattle with her best friend. This geographic restart involves a job at the local bakery under the guidance of a matronly curmudgeon. Wyn spends a lot of time kneading dough, another form of moving meditation, creating a strong network of gluten so that the bread will develop and grow. An apt metaphor for Wyn’s self-discovery.
Listen to my conversation with Judi Hendricks
When Bread Alone was published in 2001, I was a 32-year-old single mother with two kids ages seven and ten. Like Wyn, I had been a bread baker and longed to get back to a professional kitchen and was recently offered a job at the local bakery for $8 / hour. I knew that I could benefit from some meditative bread baking and the opportunity to get out of the house. Alas, I turned it down because it wasn’t practical for me to report to work at 5am because I needed to get my kids off to school. It would have cost me money to take the job. Reading about Wyn and the cast of characters at the Queen Street Bakery helped to fill the void.
England is where you will find the best scones, or “scons.” Meant to be a conduit for lemon curd, jam, and clotted cream, they are dense, a little dry, and not too sweet. The Jen’s Short Scones recipe is the closest I’ve ever found. Below is the recipe as it appears in Bread Alone. In my conversation with Judi, I found out that the recipe in the novel is a riff on one from the Zuni Cafe.
One of the things I love about this recipe is the flexibility of the “add ins.” Instead of cranberries and pecans, you can add candied ginger, walnuts, chopped dates, currants, poppy seeds, lemon juice and zest. There are endless flavor combinations. Once the batter is complete and the scones have been cut into any shape you prefer, you can bake them all, or you can freeze them at this point for baking off later. I place them in a Ziploc freezer bag, lay them flat in the freezer, and bake them off in my toaster oven as I want to eat them. Which is usually every morning with my tea!
The series of pictures below show Jen’s Short Scones being prepared at altitude in Carbondale, Colorado using flour from Roaring Fork Mill. These were made with fresh cranberries and toasted pecans. I chopped the cranberries and tossed them in granulated sugar before adding. Even with the substitutions required to bake at altitude, the scones turned out perfectly!
Bread Alone is the first book in a trilogy. The second book is The Baker’s Apprentice published in 2006 by Harper Perennial, and the third is Baker’s Blues, published in 2015 by Chien Bleu Press.
Lovely interview! Thanks for including the recipe. I’m not much of a baker but will give it a go this winter.