Brigham Young University professor R. Kirk Belnap hopes to verify "scone sightings" outside the Intermountain West.
By scones, he means the fried bread dough or "Mormon scone" that Grandma used to make.Belnap, a socio-linguist, chuckles when he talks about scones, but he is really quite serious about the linguistics project he helped students with last year that focused on the origin of the Mormon scone.
Inspiration for the project came from a lecture given by Cheryl Brown, associate dean of humanities at BYU.
Brown used scones as an example of how a word can have different meanings in different cultures. In Utah, a scone is fried bread dough, but in England it is a baked biscuit. A traditional dictionary lists the British definition of scone but not the Utah one.
After he heard the lecture, Belnap sent the students in his honors seminar on a quest to learn how the Utah scone got its name.
They first posted a query on a computer bulletin board with approximately 3,200 users. Sixty-eight responded. The answers fell into two camps: the British baked scone and the Mormon West fried scone. Many answers from Scotland and England, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, included a different pronunciation with a short "o" vowel (rhymes with gone) rather than the long "o" (rhymes with bone) pronunciation common in Utah.
"We had a few people mention they had seen something called scones at fairs in Alaska and Indiana, but we haven't been able to verify those sightings," Belnap said.
"If you ever run across scones in a state fair, you nail them. You find out where they got them, what the tradition is. Bring them in alive, please."
It seems the Utah fried scone did not come directly from Scotland or England, so the question remained where Utah's scone originated. Did the pioneers copy the American Indian fry bread or the Mexican sopapillas? In trying to find answers, Belnap said he heard there may be Midwestern scones. The students contacted bakeries in Omaha, Neb., and only one of seven reported making scones - a British baked variety made once a year for a local hotel. Some bakery employees remembered their mothers frying dough, but they didn't call the product scones. Bakeries in North Dakota and Indiana had never heard of fried scones, but one person said it sounded similar to "elephant ears."
The students pored over cookbooks of all kinds from various regions of the United States, looking for recipes that resembled the Utah fried scone. They discovered fried bread dough is common around the country; it just has different names. Some of the names included "Baptist cakes," "dough gobs," "fried dough" and "puffy sticks" (Amish). The new Dictionary of American Regional English, which has volumes out only through the letter H, lists a few other fried breads as well: "holy poke," "huffjuffs," "dough goddy," "doughboy" and "doughbelly."
Such findings led Belnap to believe the pioneers did not learn scone making from the American Indians or Mexicans. Rather, they brought the tradition with them from the East.
But why do people in the West call them "scones" instead of one of the Midwestern or Eastern names? Belnap said it is likely from the British roots. Proportionally, more British immigrants came to Utah than any other state in the country, he said. The British term scone, which is a rather all-purpose name for various breads, was applied at some point to a traditional American fried dough and it stuck.
Students presented a paper on the scones project to the Deseret Language and Linguists Society Symposium at BYU last spring. In October, student Jeana Yamamoto presented a revised version of the paper to the Rocky Mountain Dialect Society meeting in Denver.
And the research continues as Belnap and Yamamoto follow various leads.