AH, THE WONDERS of modern communication.
Kirk Belnap just sent me some e-mail from the Jerusalem Center in Israel with a tidbit of Mormon folklore for the pioneer sesquicentennial.And I don't even have e-mail.
In fact, this seven-page story doesn't mention Jerusalem at all. It's a story about "Mormon scones." The fried, puffed up pillows of dough that our mothers made for us may not be scones at all.
I can see the headline:
Scholar at Jerusalem Center unmasks bogus scones.
Is this a great place and time to be a newspaper columnist, or what?
The truth is, I found Belnap's paper to be fascinating. He pours hours of study into the topic the way French minimalists used to write 10-page poems about bars of soap.
I enjoyed it very much.
And I'd publish the whole paper if I could. I just don't have the space. Besides, Belnap seems like the kind of guy who may one day come around here to apply for my job.
Just the same, I will offer you a few "scone" highlights. Belnap and his charges did telephone surveys, searched cookbooks (one student alone went through 80), called experts and studied dictionaries.
Here are a few their "greatest hits":
- Most Europeans pronounce "scone" as scawn. In America, however, it's usually "scone." In England, some apparently feel scawn is more sophisticated. (But then those doughboys over there also say "po-tah-to" instead of "po-tay-to" - but let's call the whole thing off.)
- After extensive research, Belnap and his students found that our puffy, eat-em-with-maple-syrup Mormon scones may actually be - gasp! - "Baptist cakes" - Protestant treats that often go by the shady aliases of "holy poke" and "huffjuff." They traced our scones all the way back to New England, in fact. Brigham Young may have even eaten the things as a kid.
- The Dictionary of American Regional English calls our scones all sorts of names, including dough goddy, dough gob, doughboy and doughbelly. The dictionary says that the scone was used when homemakers got behind in their breadmaking and needed to quick-fry some bread for supper.
(I don't know about you, but I don't like dictionaries to criticize my mother that way.)
- As for the term "Mormon scone," Belnap feels it may come from the fact so many Mormon settlers were from the British isles. They simply took a generic term for biscuit and applied it to breads that looked, smelled, felt, tasted or cooked up anything at all like the original British "scone."
In the end, Belnap quotes Raymond Sokolov, food editor for Natural History:
". . . Until some researcher makes a lucky strike in a Mormon woman's diary or pioneer cookbook, we are never going to know for sure how it was that Navajos, Chicanos and Mormons ended up eating similar fry breads."
Fair enough. I'll wait. I'm a patient man when it comes to history.