When Sarah Merker sat down one day in 2013 to snack on a scone at one of Britain’s many, many historic sites, she had no idea that she was embarking upon a quest that would take her a decade to complete and transform her into a kind of national celebrity.
She and her husband had just become dues-paying members of the National Trust, a conservation society that manages historic properties like castles and country manors across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland’s are managed separately). The idea was to reward herself with scones for visiting and learning about the sites, and to write a blog that rated the history, and the baking, each on a five-point scale.
Her blog posts eventually formed the basis of “The National Trust Book of Scones,” a blend of recipes and her irreverent historical insights, published in 2017 just after Ms. Merker had eaten about 150 scones on location. And when Ms. Merker, 49, visited her 244th and final National Trust property this month, she made national headlines in a country that takes both its scones and its history quite seriously.
But there was a poignancy to the attention, too: she had lost her husband, Peter Merker, to cancer in 2018, leaving her to finish the quest without the partner she called her “Scone Sidekick.”
Lately, as she has been in the spotlight, she said it has felt as though he was back by her side.
“As anyone who has lost anyone will attest, you just want them back, even for a short time, and that’s what the media coverage and this project have given me,” she said. “That has been the most beautiful thing.”
Where scones are an ‘irrational obsession’
Scones have deep roots in Britain. Recipes for them were printed as early as 1669 and the word scone appears in customs paperwork from 1480, according to “A History of British Baking,” by the historian and archaeologist Emma Kay.
It wasn’t until the early 19th century that the country’s “slight irrational obsession” with them developed in earnest, Ms. Kay wrote in an email. They eventually came to be associated with the custom of taking “afternoon tea,” a light, late-afternoon meal often featuring tea, scones, cakes and sandwiches.
In the late 19th century, afternoon tea became “codified and mythologized” as British motor tourism and vacationing became more popular, said Annie Gray, a food historian. So did the modern take on a scone, which is leavened with baking soda or baking powder, rather than with yeast, as…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at NYT > Travel…