Nigel Slater: A warm pumpkin scone for a winter’s afternoon

A warm scone is an object of extraordinary comfort, but even more so when it has potato in it. The farl, a slim scone of flour, butter and mashed potato, is rarely seen nowadays and somehow all the more of a treat when it is. I have taken the idea and run with it, mashing steamed pumpkin into the hand-worked crumbs of flour and butter to make a bread that glows orange when you break it. Soft, warm and floury, this is more than welcome for a Sunday breakfast in winter or a tea round the kitchen table. Cooked initially in a frying pan and then finished in the oven, I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart – a fine contrast for the sweet, floury ‘scone’ and its squishy centre.

enough for 4

peeled and seeded pumpkin – 300g
plain flour – 140g
bicarbonate of soda – half a teaspoon
salt – half a teaspoon
butter – 70g
an egg, beaten
warm milk – 90ml
thyme leaves – 2 teaspoons
a little oil or butter

Cut the pumpkin into large chunks and steam until tender enough to mash. Set the oven to 200°C/Gas 6.

Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter into small chunks and rub it in with your fingertips. You could do this in a food processor, but it hardly seems worth the washing up.

Crush the pumpkin with a potato masher, then beat in the egg, followed by the milk and thyme leaves. Scoop this into the flour mixture and mix well. Season with black pepper.

Warm a heavy, non-stick frying pan with a metal handle over a low to moderate heat. Melt a little oil or butter in it, then pile in the dough and smooth it flat. Leave to cook over a low heat till the underside is pale gold. Lightly oil a dinner plate. Loosen the underside of the scone with the help of a palette knife. Put the plate over the top of the pan, then, holding the plate in place, tip the pan so that the scone falls on to the plate. Slide the scone back into the frying pan and cook the other side for four or five minutes. Put the pan in the oven for seven minutes or until the scone is lightly set in the middle.

Turn the scone out of the pan and slice into thick wedges. Serve warm, with cheese or some grilled bacon.

And more on pumpkins…

• The sweetness of the pumpkin and winter squash family works best with something very savoury. I often marry slow-cooked sausages, whose skins have turned sticky, with sweet and fluffy pumpkin mash.
• Once a pumpkin has been cut, its storage time is substantially reduced. Rather than covering a wedge of it with clingfilm, which encourages it to sweat, I store it in the fridge unwrapped, then just shave a wafer-thin slice off its edge and discard it each time I use it.
• I have never been convinced about winter squash with fish in the same way that I have about the delights of summer squash and courgettes. The extra sweetness is difficult to match with anything piscine. That said, prawns can work well enough with pumpkin in an Asian-style soup, as will scallops if you cook them on a hot grill so that a golden crust forms on the outside, then eat them with pumpkin purée.
• A pumpkin that sounds hollow when tapped will keep better than one where there is no sound at all. The really large members of the winter squash family can be intimidating.
• It is probably a good idea for new cooks to start with one of the smaller ‘onion’ squash, which have much of the colour and flavour of the big boys but are a jolly sight easier to handle.

Nigel Slater’s latest cookbook, Tender, Volume One: A cook and his vegetable patch, is published by Fourth Estate on the 17th of September. With over 400 new recipes, Tender chronicles the things we eat – from the vegetable patch to the kitchen table.