Mike Devlin Goes From Scotland to America: The Full Story of Scones and Biscuits

For the uninitiated, scones began life in Scotland as a sort of farl cake and were made with oats in the very early 1500s (farl cakes are essentially potato cakes). By 1669 they had made their way to England, ended up in a book, and had changed their name to that of scone. As baking powder/soda did not exist back then, yeast used to make ale was utilised (and why not, because the English were constantly making ale), and cream instead of milk. Food health was not quite what it is today, and the scones thanked its absence.

But here is where it gets a little weird. That recipe—housed in The Welcome Collection in London—had a variation, and it was more savoury and served with bacon and gravy.

Yep, we will come back to that bit later.

Chemical aeration did not arrive until 1843, which coincidentally coincides with the advent of Afternoon Tea; how very spiffing.

Fast forward to today and we have what is the modern-day version. But what is the modern-day version? People the world over make scones, and as is par for the course they will say that theirs are the correct ones.

A typical scone recipe will have milk, flour, salt, sugar, butter, and baking powder. This produces a short and crumbly texture and is akin to a biscuit (no, not a cookie)—which we have still yet to get to—but should it have egg in it? Evidently, this is a most contentious issue—not that there's fighting on the streets about it—and divides a lot of people. The addition of egg creates a richer dough that also holds its structure better in the oven (how many times have you seen wonky scones that have fallen over mid-bake?) and creates a better bite. Better establishments will also use eggs in their scone recipes, so if that doesn't tell you who is right and who is wrong, I don't know what will.

However, you can take it up even further and just go all out. Why use flour when you can use high-grade bread flour for far more structure? Why stick with butter when you can go with a bigger fat content and richer butter, then freeze it and grate it in? Cream is better than milk, but what about a blend of crème fraîche and 4% milk? And then we have the eggs.

How about hard-boiled duck eggs, discarding the white part and pushing the cooked, room-temperature yolks through a very fine sieve to create an egg powder? Oddly, doing it this way protects the flour from the liquid and creates a very soft crumb and a deep colour. Didn't know that, did you?

If you are ever charged an exorbitant price for scones, make sure they are these ones; otherwise, they are taking you for a ride.

So there we have scones pretty much covered. Or have we? Because enter, stage right: biscuits.

Now we have mentioned way back in a past article that biscuit literally means ‘baked twice’ (Latin: bis = twice, and coctus = cooked) to create a hard, dehydrated food source that is ideal for long journeys at sea. These bricks, for want of a better word, arrived in the New Land across the Atlantic and continued to be made. However, with an abundance of pigs, and therefore lard, they began to take on the appearance of bread, especially when chemical leavening agents were introduced.

Scones, as we know them, really weren't as popular as you might think until around the 1850s—about the time of baking powder. It was only then that their popularity exploded.

Meanwhile, over in what was now the USA, they had stuck with this biscuit thing that had been introduced years before. But we have the South to thank for at least something during these troubling times, which were interrupted constantly with casual family-fun racism, as soft wheat grew in abundance there and made ideal flour for these biscuits, making them nice and soft.

That should be that, but we need to go all the way back to the English savoury scone to find out what happened with it. The scone itself was happy being transformed into the sweet variety, so this version decided to up sticks and go to Ireland (with the Scottish also interested) instead, to become the Soda Farl.

When the Celts started to emigrate, they took it with them, and it smashed into the biscuit the English had brought in the 1600s. Add the aforementioned amendments and the South's wheat, and the biscuit became its own entity.

‘The shortest way to fresh bread,’ they said, and as it was cooked in a skillet, that was true. Incidentally, farl comes from the Gaelic word fardel, meaning ‘four parts’, as the dough is cut (but not all the way through) into four in a cross manner; this enables an easy break into pieces after cooking.

They are eaten warm with butter, and maybe some honey, or dried in bacon fat or butter, and served with sausages and black (blood) pudding.

So there we have the full journey: from Scotland to England to America, and a split that sent it to Ireland and back to Scotland.

But do not get me started on jam going on first on a scone—you don't butter your toast after the marmalade, do you?

Oh, and finally, ‘skon’ (rhyming with gone) versus ‘skōne’ (rhyming with bone): long story short, it is Dutch to Middle Age Scots to English to Shakespeare’s English to class systems. Basically, if you think you are better than everyone else, you say ‘skon’; if you are anyone else, you say ‘skōne’. So scone it is then.