Are You a Scone or Biscuit?

On Saturday I had a delicious cheese and sausage scone at Ryebread Café and as I sat contemplating this giant, craggy triangle I started wondering what it is that made this a scone rather than a biscuit. I posted the photo on Instagram, and posed that query. I got a few responses, and decided to do some of my own digging. I compared some recipes, checked my favorite experts Mark Bittman and Shirley Corriher, and found this article in the New York Times. All of which confirmed my suspicions that there isn’t much difference. Scone dough generally has sugar, and egg.

I am already thinking about my next trip to Ryebread for another scone, because theirs are better than any I’ve ever made. They reminded me of the prosciutto bread I used to get on Mulberry St. in New York. They had sweet ones too. I will definitely have to go back.

I didn’t grow up in a biscuit family, and was fairly late to making them. I make them both rolled and dropped. At the Morning Glory in Philly they make really good ones with a crumb topping that mystifies me, but I love them. Recently I have relied on Mark Bittman’s recipe from How to Cook Everything, (which if you don’t have, I highly recommend) and I roll and cut them. Biscuits are one of those things that seem hard to make, but are super easy and a real morning treat. And according to him scones are just a richer biscuit.

Last Christmas I was invited to a friend’s house and she was making ham, so I offered to bring biscuits. I decided I would find a recipe for the flakiest biscuits. The recipe I used even had you laminate the dough, like you would do when making puff pastry, folding cold butter into a dough, then rolling it and folding it a few times to create many layers. the biscuits tasted fine, and certainly looked impressive, but I wouldn’t make them again. It turns out I don’t want my biscuits quite that flaky.

I recall having scones on my first trip to London, and what I got was a small round cake with currants, not biscuit-y at all. British and Irish scones aren’t what Americans call scones. Those are more cake-y and drier than ours. We bake the butter in, they spread it on, we add sugar to the batter, they use loads of jam. To read more about British scones here is a great article from Cook’s Illustrated including a recipe for traditional scones. I like them too, but prefer the American ones, I like the craggy surfaces. Do you have a preference? What do you think of when you think of scones or biscuits?