Turf Buns – Another of my Looking Back Moments

As many of you know my early childhood was spent travelling the highways and byways of the UK with my parents and grand parents in a horse drawn caravan or Vardo as we called them. Yes, my family were Romany Gypsies. Our only method of cooking was on the Hog ( a stick fire) outside, consequently, we were limited to what we could cook. It was either cooked in the iron stew pot, or fried and baked on the iron griddle plate (we called it the Girdle) and occasionally spit road the odd pheasant over the hot embers and as I recall on the few occasions I tried the bird ended up in the fire. As you can imagine with no oven or heat control of any sort it was a work of art for Mother producing a variety of meals under such limited conditions, but, we always are well even if the ingredients were in short supply from time to time

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However, back to this recipe, it’s something I was brought up on and really enjoyed, we always called them Turf Buns because when going out each day to try and earn a living we would put a couple of lumps of turf on the fire and this slowed down the burning and on our return we would pop a couple of logs on and have a good fire in no time.

Back in 1983 Betty’s Cafe in Harrogate started making these Turf Buns and christened them ‘Betty’s Fat Rascals’, I don’t know how they arrived at the name, they are a sort of a cross between a Scone and Rock Cake and over the years have become quite famous several of the Betty’s shops in and around the Yorkshire area.

GO TO RECIPE

I never actually had my Mothers written recipe, I just knew it was a fist full of this and a couple of pinches of that and a splash of milk, however, over the years I have experimented quite a lot with my scone recipe and I think I have come up with the nearest thing to the Turf Buns of my youth.

GO TO RECIPE

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