Accroding to historians scones (or pogácsa in Hungarian) are one of the oldest biscuits that were already baked  in the time of the Hungarian conquest. Scones are small, round biscuits popular mainly in the Carpathian Basin and on the Balkans. Their name derives from the word focacea (baked dough), which is derivative of the Latin word “focus” that means fire. The word pogácsa was taken over from the South Slavic languages (it’s called pogača in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia).

In Hungary scones are typically served as a welcome snack, cheese, crackling and curd cheese are the most liked flavours. Crackling scones are made of laminated yeast dough, which contains lard, ground or finely chopped cracklings, and seasoned with salt and black pepper. Folding is not as fiddly as you might think, it’s rather time consuming than challenging. The dough has to be folded three times, taking a 30 minute break between two foldings.

Buying cracklings doesn’t put us to great trouble as every butcher provides them in Hungary, but I know that availability in other countries isn’t obvious and getting hold of fresh cracklings could be an obstacle. But if you can obtain pork fat, you can make cracklings at home by rendering lard.