A cooking story from the Emporia Gazette of Kansas recently popped up on my Jane Austen Google alert. “I have long adored scones,” wrote the author. “Initially it was because that’s what everyone in my Jane Austen and Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse books were always eating.”
Scones in Jane Austen? I couldn’t remember any, and a few online searches through Austen’s novels, fragments, letters and juvenilia explained why: the words “scone” or “scones” never appear. Scones are so quintessentially English that we feel sure Austen’s quintessentially English characters must have eaten them – but they didn’t, at least not as far as she tells us.
Still, it seems quite likely that Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, who published more than 130 novels between them, put in a scone or two somewhere. And the recipe looks yummy.
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