Girdle (Harvest) Scones

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Preparation info
  • Serves

    4

    • Difficulty

      Easy

Appears in
Gloagburn: Recipes from a Scottish Farm

By Alison Niven

Published 2025

  • About

This is my mum’s recipe, and I must have been eating them all of my life. Our family associates girdle scones with harvest time – I fill them with cheese and tomato and take them out to the fields to keep everyone going – but we also sometimes have them for breakfast, cooked in leftover bacon fat instead of in a dry pan.

Ingredients

  • 170 g plain flour
  • tsp cream of tartar
  • 1

Method

  1. Put the flour, cream of tartar, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
  2. Dip the knife into the syrup tin, then lift it out (with plenty of syrup clinging to it) and start to mix it into the dry ingredients. Pour in 140ml milk and beat it in with the sticky knife to get a very soft dough that just holds its shape and no more. Add a little more milk if you think it nee