Scones

When I was ten years old, my family moved from Portland, Oregon, to England for a year. As an American kid on his first trip abroad, I guess the two-word description for my reaction would be “culture shock”: cars on the wrong side of the road, candy bars with funny names, red double-decker buses, and a variety of strange accents. The one thing I knew (or thought I knew) about England was English muffins, so I was surprised that I never came across an English muffin in England—crumpets, yes, tea biscuits, yes, but no English muffins. I particularly remember liking the scones. To this day, most scones on this side of the Atlantic still leave me unmoved. All too often they have the texture I imagine you’d get with a baked hockey puck: dense, dry, and oversweetened (when they aren’t undersweetened). Most English scones, on the other hand, are a type of tender, unyeasted bread, and they’re slightly sweet but not overly so. Breakfast scones and tea scones tend to be sweet, while with savory scones, which are nice at lunch, the sweetness is dialed back a bit. Finally, if you don’t eat a well-made scone over a plate or napkin, you’re definitely going to get crumbs on your shirt or the table. Good scones are crumbly; that’s part of what makes them so crisp yet tender.