PORT ANGELES — Fifteen minutes before it opened at 9 a.m. 11 people had already lined up in front of the Dry Creek Grange scone booth near the north entrance to the Clallam County Fairgrounds on Friday.
“This is why I come to fair,” said Kathe Smith of Sequim, who also admitted to stockpiling scones. “I put them in my freezer so that I can enjoy them for as long as possible.”
The four-day Clallam County Fair that began Thursday and runs through Sunday has returned after a two-year COVID hiatus and with it the ritual of stopping by the Dry Creek Grange scone booth to buy a crumbly Fisher scone slathered with sticky jam and eating it while strolling down the midway.
As they have done for the past 59 years, grange volunteers inside the booth mixed, rolled, cut and baked the scones for 10-12 minutes at 425 degrees, splitting them with a knife, brushing them with butter, spreading them with a generous dollop of jam, carefully assembling the two halves and sliding them into a white paper pastry envelope.
Preparations for the fair begin about five weeks before it starts, said Cindy Kelly, who has volunteered at the booth since she joined the grange 32 years ago and now organizes and leads the scone-making operation. But this year’s effort came with a number of challenges shared by other businesses attempting to re-start or ramp up production after a two-year layoff: shortages and discontinuations, vendors that closed, and changes in wholesale quantities.
“We always used Trailblazer raspberry and blackberry jam that came in five-gallon buckets,” Kelly said. “But now they only sell 32-ounce glass jars and they don’t make blackberry jam anymore.”
After some taste-testing, Kelly said the grange decided to offer the Trailblazer’s four-berry jam (blackberry, raspberry, strawberry and blueberry) in place of the blackberry. No one has complained (yet).
Ordering Fisher scone mix also presented some surprises. First, the distributor in Bremerton had gone out of business, then the grange learned they couldn’t order it in 50-pound boxes as they had previously because it was now only available in 25-pound boxes.
“We had to drive to Woodinville [where Conifer Specialities, which makes Fisher Scones, is based] to pick it up,” Kelly said. “We ordered 60 boxes of mix, but when we got there, we only got 42.”
Kelly said she always tries to order a little bit more scone mix than she thought they might need.
“In 2019, we ran out of mix on Sunday and had to stop making them,” she said. “That was not good.”
Three shifts of eight volunteers work the scone booth each day of the fair. Friday’s first shift was being handled by a group of teens who had attended a recent junior grange camp at Camp David Jr.
Kaylen Mason, 16, of Port Angeles, who was on jam and butter duty, said that she was making scones for the first time. Her verdict?
“It’s very messy, but it isn’t that hard.”
For Evie Perry, 15, of Kennewick, putting the two halves back together without the entire warm scone falling apart was a bit frustrating.
“They fall apart so easily and you have to get them in the bag without getting jam on it,” she said.
Kelly said that the grange tried to price scones as low as possible while still making a profit. This year they’re $3 — up from $2.50 in 2019. It’s cash only, no checks or credit cards.
The county gets 18 percent of gross sales and the grange must also pay discounted entrance tickets for volunteers. Funds generated by the sale of scones (as well as water and coffee) go toward maintenance on the grange’s 103-year-old building, which Kelly estimated ran to about $9,200 a year.
Dry Dreek Grange scone booth hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday.
Kelly acknowledged that the tradition of buying and eating a scone was an important part of the fair experience for many, but that the grange couldn’t be completely dedicated to doing things the way it had in the past.
“In the old days the ladies made their own jam and the building had a dirt floor,” she said. “We’re not going to do that.”
But for Kathe Smith, the unchanging nature of the scones was central to their appeal.
“It’s the same every year,” she said. “I could never make a scone like this because it only tastes this way at the fair.”
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached at Paula.Hunt@soundpublishing.com.
