Food & Drink: Scone legends: Recipe

THE response to our breakfast recipe competition has been overwhelming, so much so that I have not been able to acknowledge all your contributions. Moreover, last week I managed to credit Kate Pettem of west London with the hot apple sauce muffins. They were, in fact, submitted by Jenni Viner of Ware, Hertfordshire. Both, along with our winner named below, will receive an English breakfast for two in the River Room of the Savoy.

This recipe for girdle, or griddle, pancakes comes from Jean Coad of Hitchin, Hertfordshire. She found it in an old Penguin cookery book. Legend has it that the Scots word 'girdle' beset the Playtex company in the Sixties. When it set up its first European rubber girdle factory in Scotland (to make corsets, not cookware), the Scots employed iron-workers.

Girdle Scones

Yield: 24 small pancakes

Ingredients: 6oz/170g plain flour

2tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

2 eggs

1oz/28g sugar

7fl oz/200ml milk

1 2 oz/14g melted butter

Preparation: Sift dry ingredients into bowl. Add eggs and half liquid. Beat and add remaining liquid, then melted butter. Heat girdle. Grease. Drop batter from tablespoon. Cook until bubbles appear on top, but do not break. Turn and cook other side. Reserve in napkin in warm oven. Serve with butter and maple syrup.

Further to our last kedgeree recipe, Victoria Cichy writes from Sandy, Bedfordshire, suggesting the addition of single cream, lime juice, grated nutmeg and cayenne pepper. As smoked fish, Ms Cichy specifies 'undyed haddock'. Diana Rothenstein of Braintree, Essex, poaches the fish in milk, using what's left to make a white sauce, finishing it with paprika.

Letters continue to pour in over the origin of 'Brummagem Rissoles'. Henrietta Guest of Atherstone, Warwickshire, knows it as Fanny Cradock's 'Curate's Eyes' and cites appearances in cookbooks dating from 1933. They were 'egg in a window' to Elizabeth O'Brien in Leeds. Joan Seddon of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, describes them as 'Windy Nook Wapplers', an invention, she says, of her father's in Co Durham in the Fifties. Her sons apparently came across a pale imitation at Scout Camp called 'Ossie Eggs'.

Recipes are welcome for our next category: pizza. Send to Emily Green, Recipe, Weekend Features, The Independent, 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB. The prize is a 1986 Chianti Classico Felsina Berardenga from Winecellars in south London.