Mutant scones

- Hi grandma, it's Manuela, I'm calling you from Paris, do you remember our scones recipe?

This is how this anecdote begins. A grandmother in Barcelona, the granddaughter in Paris and the recipe for round Scottish muffins that the English use to accompany tea. A very "well-to-do ladies" custom, and my grandmother, the first one. But this innocent call, far from being lost in oblivion, opened the jar of my suspicions and showed me a side of my grandmother that I would never have imagined. It's not that I didn't know her well, in fact I have studied her very well since I wore pigtails: the songs she hums without realizing it, her tone of voice that varies according to the language she speaks, her way of dressing for each occasion, the perfumes that accompany each mood, the vintage fetish garments and the history of each one, her star dishes she goes to when she doesn't want to fail... A myth like my grandmother requires peculiarities, the strange thing is that I didn't realize it before.

Just a note: my grandmother is a great cook, even a better pastry chef, she enjoys cooking so much! and then she completes that pleasure by presenting the dishes in a masterful way on the tables she prepares to entertain her guests, that is an art! Staging worthy of any Wes Anderson movie: light, music, rhythm, photography, characters, scripts, special effects... everything counts when it comes to setting a table. But that's another story. To the point, she cooks like angels, as a worthy student of Le Cordon Bleu, and has tried, as far as possible, to pass on her passion to me.

Scones, as I was saying, are round rolls that are taken to accompany tea, and as my grandmother offered tea all the time, she would call home to ask for my help, which I'm sure she didn't need either (my grandmother has always had a lot of help at home), but she made me feel indispensable. So during my first years in Barcelona, from a very young age, I would bake scones with her. We would make the dough, roll it out, and I was in charge of cutting them with the round mold and transferring them to the previously floured tray. After presenting them on their Limoges porcelain plates, she would prepare a little package, deliciously wrapped, which I would take home to hand out, and which always arrived open and diminished.

Over the years, as I lived abroad, we kept the custom with less religiosity but the same love, and every summer that I came to spend with them in Barcelona, we would bake together again.

That famous Parisian Christmas a few years ago I wanted to make the recipe for a tea with friends in the style of my grandmother, and I called her to pass me the recipe.

- Hi grandma, it's Manuela, I'm calling you from Paris, how are you, long time... blah blah blah... Do you remember our scones recipe?

There was silence on the other side and then he dictated to me the proportions that I wrote down in a little notebook (I always carry one, which serves as a second head and which I spend at breakneck speed. I never throw them away because they are full of memories, ideas, stories, drawings, designs, friends... they are the extension of my hand). Of course the scones didn't turn out as well as hers, but that's normal, her hands are magic and the ingredients are substantially different in each place.

Months later, this time from Melbourne, I called her again to hear her voice and with the excuse of another tea I asked her again for the recipe.

She sighed and went on to relate it. I wrote it down again in another notebook and they were not as good as hers. They were nothing like the ones in Paris either, but again I attributed it to the difference in the food in each place.

The thing is that a few days later, I was looking in my notebooks for the address of a wonderful antique shop that some acquaintances of mine from Madrid had set up in Melbourne, and I came across the first scones recipe I wrote down, the one from Paris, I passed it by, but a few pages later, I came back to it. The proportions were given in tablespoons, and the Melbourne one in cups. Strange. I picked up the two notebooks and compared the recipes. They were not the same in any way. The amounts, however much they were given in different measurements, were not proportional, and to check, I called her back.

- Sorry grandma, I'm on the street, I know you gave me the recipe two days ago but I want to buy the ingredients and I don't have it with me.

And he gave it to me again - a third, totally different version!

That's how I discovered that my grandmother, within her greatness, has that particular trait, and that is that her recipes are like the formula for Coca-Cola, and no one can know them, because no one has to make them as good as she does. She adds ingredients, removes them, modifies the quantities... what a pity that I can't go back to my childhood to steal her recipes for scons and the others she cooked without fear of being discovered in front of me.

At first it hurt a little, I didn't like that my dear grandmother had secrets from me, or that she considered me a potential rival to her art meticulousness, but then I incorporated it into her personality traits and her very unique character.

And since I wanted to look at it with affection, because she deserves it, I decided to bring that trait to my own terrain. Over the years I have collected at least a dozen sconesrecipes, each one different, and I have paired them with the cities from where I called her to ask her for them. The one from Morocco is with cinnamon, the one from London with brown sugar, the one from Buenos Aires with cloves, the one from Budapest with lemon zest, the one from Prague with orange, the one from Milan with oatmeal or rye, I can't remember... I have all the versions, and I keep calling her to get a new variation, which is never hers. I am convinced that she plays along with me, but we have never talked about it, because that would force her to confess that she does not want to say anything, and I do not want to put her in that position either.

This is the last one that happened to me. I baked them last night and they are wonderful, but they are not the ones we used to make together, I have not tried them again. I lie, I have tried them again, but only when I go to her house, although she no longer waits for me to bake them together. When she opens the door to me, her house smells of warm scones, and indeed, they are already fabulously displayed on her tea table on her divine Limoges plates.

Scones recipe

Ingredients:

- 2 cups flour
- 4 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/3 cup butterkeel
- 2/3 cup milk

Instructions:

Mix the ingredients lightly to form a soft dough.
Knead gently on a board.
Roll out the dough to a thickness of 2 cm.
Cut the dough into rounds of 4 cm in diameter (I use a small glass).
Place the dough on a tray sprinkled with flour and bake at 230º.