Singin' Hinny

A heavy iron pan goes on the heat at a Northumberland kitchen range, ungreased, and a flat round of currant-studded dough the size of a dinner plate is laid on it. Within a minute the fat in the dough starts to render against the hot iron and lets out a long thin hiss. That hiss is the name. The cake is a singin' hinny. It is cooked dry on a stone or pan rather than baked in an oven, turned once when the underside has freckled, lifted off when the second face matches, and split across the equator with a knife while still too warm to hold flat. Cold salted butter goes into the steaming crumb immediately, melts on contact, and the sandwich is the cake closed back over itself with the butter running.

The fat in the dough is the engineering. Lard, in the traditional Northumbrian recipe, is rubbed into flour until the mixture takes on the texture of damp sand, with a generous handful of currants, a spoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt and just enough milk or buttermilk to bring it to a soft round. Butter takes lard's place in modern kitchens. Either way the rendered fat is what reads on the bakestone as the singing sound, and what gives the crumb the slightly crumbly, slightly short eat that distinguishes a hinny from a scone. The dough does not rise much. It cooks through on direct heat alone in maybe seven or eight minutes a side, a moderate steady heat the cook holds by touch.

The split is timed and is done hot. Wait long enough for the cake to cool to room temperature and the work is done: a hinny gone cold takes butter onto the cut face rather than into it, and the whole reason for the build is the absorption. The split happens with a long knife and a folded tea-towel held flat across the top, the cake too hot to grip bare-handed. Cold salted butter goes onto the open faces in generous discs and is pressed in with the back of the knife rather than spread; it sinks into the freckled crumb and reappears as a faint sheen across the upper face within seconds. The two halves close and the hinny is eaten standing at the range, in halves or in wedges, before the steam goes.

The build fails on the stone before it fails anywhere else. Heat the pan too high and the outer crust catches and chars before the centre has set, leaving a hinny that is dark and bitter outside and raw inside; heat it too low and the cake greys, the fat fails to sing and the currants leach colour into a damp crumb. A cake too thick will not cook through and a cake too thin tears when it goes onto the bakestone, so the round is rolled to about a finger-width and patted flat by hand. Pull it off and split it before the steam has gone and the butter melts into a clean interior; leave it too long and the same butter pools on a closed surface and the eat is greasy rather than soaked. Salted butter is the only thing that goes in, because the cake is sweet from the sugar and the currants and the salt is the counter.

A Newcastle or Hexham tea-table at four o'clock in the afternoon will set out a hinny on a wooden board next to a brown teapot, with a yellow brick of Lurpak on a saucer and a knife laid across it. The conversation around it is local in a specific way: the cake is asked for as a hinny rather than a scone or a cake, and the question is whether the cook took it off the bakestone with the currants caught or held just short of catching. "Bonny" and "canny" do the work of compliment, the hinny itself meaning a Tyneside endearment that the cake borrowed from. At a Greggs or a Hatricks counter in the Northeast the same cake can come prepacked as a tea-cake-style griddle scone; the home version on a bakestone is the canonical form and the one a Geordie grandmother makes from memory rather than recipe.

The variations stay inside the griddle-cake frame. A plain hinny drops the currants for a faster, less sweet round closer to a girdle scone and is sometimes eaten with a thin scrape of golden syrup in place of butter. A fatty cutty is a richer, smaller version weighted heavier with lard and cooked individually rather than as a single big round. A wedge of Wensleydale or a sharp Northumbrian cheese laid on the warm split half turns the balance savoury and is a regional reading rather than the default. The pikelet, the drop scone and the Welsh cake are griddle relatives across the British Isles; the singin' hinny's combination of currants, lard and a single very large round on the bakestone is the Northumbrian fingerprint.

The Northumberland Griddle

The name has been in print since the middle of the nineteenth century. Florence White's 1932 Good Things in England, a county-by-county collection that became one of the standard interwar records of English regional baking, gives a Northumberland recipe under this spelling; older Newcastle household notebooks and a number of Tyneside newspaper recipe columns of the late Victorian decades record the same cake under the same name. The cake is consistently sited in Northumberland and the Tyneside coalfields across the records, and the word hinny, a Tyneside variant of honey used as a term of endearment, is the older Geordie usage the cake borrowed for its name.

The technique pre-dates the name. Cooking on a heated stone or a flat iron pan, called a bakestone in Northumberland, a griddle in Scotland and a girdle in parts of the North, is the older method of bread-making across the upland British Isles, used wherever a domestic oven was unavailable and a hearth fire was. The bakestone hung from a hook over the hearth or sat on a swing-out crane, and the hinny was a single large round designed to fit it. The currant-and-lard version sits inside that older technique rather than starting one of its own.

In May 1937 the British Empire Cancer Campaign held a tea at the Bath Assembly Rooms billed in the local press as a "Singin' Hinny Tea". The name was, by then, current enough in Northumbrian and wider English print to function as the headline draw on a charity poster. The cake itself has stayed on Tyneside kitchen ranges across the intervening eighty-nine years, made the same way on the same kind of pan, named for the same sound the fat makes when the round goes down on the heat. Bakeries in Newcastle, Hexham and Morpeth still sell pre-packed singin' hinnies under the name, and the cake is one of the standard items on the Northumberland tea-room counter alongside the stottie cake, in 2026 as in 1937.