The Scone of Destiny
Have you tried The Scone Pony?
It’s an evocative question.
A few towns away from the legendary music venue, The Stone Pony, there exists a bakery, and yes, it is named The Scone Pony.
I did not know this pony, and so I set my internal task to visiting as soon as possible.
How could the two be related? How could they not? After all their geography was within ten miles.
Now, the scone for me, is an exotic food, or at least once upon a time it was. By now it is within the general category of baked good. But when I went sleuthing, I was surprised by its story, dare I say its destiny to travel the world.
Of Celtic origins the scone’s first mention is in poetry from Scotland. It dates to the early 1500’s. The Irish and the Scots call it their own and of course, the English do, too but the Scots got it down on paper.
This, seemed appropriate and not too surprising since The Scone Pony in New Jersey pulls from all these roots. This you have to understand is known as the Irish Riviera and despite its diversifying population, those roots run strong and proud.
Now, the bakery itself is darling, immaculate, and refined in a “just so” manner. My cousin who told me all about it was correct — the place is a gem.
It has clotted cream for sale in the refrigerator. It has jams for the buying. It has everything you need for what they call a cream tea, which can be a form of afternoon tea, which means somewhere around 4PM, where you gather for snacks and of course, the tea. That tradition started somewhere in the early 1800s with a Duchess. For the record her name was Anna, of Bedford. I guess that’s why someone like me associates scones with such things, with such finery as floral cups and saucers.
Now, I guess I could get us lost in the details of scones as far as types.
I could drag you into the weeds of who likes them dry and crumbly or who makes them softer and more cake-like. But that’s not where my mind goes at all these days. You see, I’m really surprised by the fact that the scone, the cake, is named for a place known for a stone, The Stone of Scone. Yep, it’s a real thing from a very real place.
In fact, the Stone of Scone is from the town of Scone, which was where the Scots would crown their kings. As time and luck would have it, the Stone of Scone was stolen by an Englishman who put it under his chair. Through the spoils of war, the Stone of Scone, now known as the Coronation Stone, has been the ceremonial king maker at Westminster for many generations. The simple round thing might have even come from Ireland, then made its way to Scotland, then to England and then — back again. It’s a traveler, this stone, as is this thing we conceive as “nobility” and even family.
And this, brings me back to the pastry scone and to what has been on my mind as of late. You see this year I could not travel, and so inside my room, pinned between the heat outside and the air conditioning I explored the way things all over the globe end up related. Things I never thought about. Like mermaids, and genes and breads and pastries.
The word scone itself is particular type of word, and it has influences that no one can really place. It might come from a Dutch word meaning a fine, white bread. It might come from the name of a particular type of Scottish hat. It definitely came into its own by being associated with a town known for kings. In fact, all things “scone” might just be about place, about a place that existed in a time, a place that exists now as a town, but also scattered —through words — all around the world.
The scone surprised me as I sat down to write this, because I really thought it would just be a review, a nice little write-up about a cute little place with a fun and quirky name. I thought I would mention my cousin whose taste and refinement matches any royalty. I figured I would take my mother, which I did, and that we would chat and eat the scones and that nothing would surprise me. I expected excellence and that I got, but I also got more in the deal. You see, the scone reflected back to me these things on my mind, about culture and food, and what all of it means.
Let me explain.
Today the world is in a state of transformation. Some of it is good and some of it is not. Some of it is inclusive and the rest is narrowly defined. I won’t get into it here, because the “it” of which I speak is ten or twenty issues, maybe more. The “It” of which I speak is grand and big, and bigger than this newsletter strives to achieve.
But it does bring home this truth, that some things are true and some things are relatively true. The truth of the scone is that it is made with basic ingredients. It comes from humble origins on the griddles of simple people. The scone is a shorthand that we have codified into something, sort of like when you take a pretty butterfly and you pin it somewhere. The scone is like that butterfly or even a gorgeous bird that you trap and put in a cage. You give it a name, maybe give it a scientific classification, and there you go — you give it a relative, seemingly objective truth.
The truth is that lineage and taxonomy, language and what they call etymology is sometimes real, and sometimes it is relative. None of it pins well to a book, because none of it is dead. None of it cages perfectly, because the song of it still escapes.
The scone, and its lineage remind me that much of what we think is fancy, is actually valued because it is practical, reliable, and somehow beautiful.
The scone also reminds of a text from my godson. He sent it just the other night, and attached to the text was a snapshot of his ancestry by virtue of his DNA. He couldn’t believe that the first results came in with second results. The results of his DNA test switched from 60% this to 26% this and that. He thought it was funny and so did I, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly sure why the ancestry of his blood was turning the software into a pretzel.
Was he more Greek?
More Slavic?
Was he Italian?
Was he “Balkan"?
Was he…? Him?
And it was at this moment when I had to point out that none of these nations or tribal groups had even existed a few thousand years ago, at least not in this way. I had to point out that his DNA was the accumulation of countless ancestors whose names and languages, whose affiliations and fates were lost to time. They were older than any known king’s throne, older than anything he had considered in 21 very short years.
The scone reminds me that delight is a constant and that definitions, although useful are also quite relative. It reminds me that culture does change over time. The long arc of history bends towards forgetting — a lot the details of the past go lost because they would get too heavy, maybe be counterproductive.
Taking what we love and knowing its context can however be helpful. It’s a fine balancing act, a kind of juggling, one that is best done with more than one person or place or even one small network of history buffs. Connecting the past to the present is game best done by us all, and to do that, we must remain open to alliances, to surprises. We must be open to the fact that there is no correct way to slather a scone with cream and jam. And yes if you’re asking that preference is really a thing, a marker of who comes from where in the old UK and “its peoples.”
As for the Jersey Shore, The Stone Pony remains an emblem of the seedier side of music, of rock and punk and surf pop. Its newer spiritual sibling sits in the town of Spring Lake, known for its upscale perfection, for flower gardens of impossible vibrance. Together they reach towards each other and out towards the hearts of us all. May they and all who love the ponies, be free.
And may I and my godson get to travel back to Europe next summer so he can learn what it feels like to walk on the rocks that his ancestors walked. Experiences, more than words, sunrises more than data points, provide the insight we need to make sense of our world. Nothing against data of course, but the scone, a simple griddle cake reminds me that the writing of history, is never more than half of the story. The story of everything alive, is always on the move.
PS—the lead image for today’s blog was made using an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform called Dall-E. I typed in “Royal scone painted in the Renaissance style” and this is what came out!