[HPFGU-OTChatter] scones, shortcake and biscuits

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

At 2:29 PM +0000 9/19/02, eloise_herisson wrote:
>
>A scone, to us, (at least, the kind you eat with clotted cream) is a
>kind of cake, sort of related to soda bread. You can taste the soda
>in them, or at least they give you that funny feeling on your teeth
>you get from eating soda bread.

Hmm . . . actually, having been raised on Southern US biscuits, it's 
_yeast_ bread that makes my teeth feel funny.

>Although some recipes call for eggs,
>normally they contain just flour, butter, milk and baking powder
>(that's  a mixture of cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda, in
>case you call it something different)- oh and a pinch of salt. You
>can add dried fruit, or alternatively, cheese, so they can be sweet
>or savoury. Usually you roll out the dough and cut it into individual
>rounds, but mine tend to go flat, so I do what my mother always did
>and make one big round which I divide into six segments before
>cooking. They're one of those things which benefit from minimal
>handling
>Ideally you eat them very soon after cooking as they go stale very
>quickly.

Okay.  Those are exactly what US biscuits are, down to optional fruit 
(very Yankee, by which I mean Northerner) or cheese (more Southern, 
although still offensive to purists).  And yes, it's baking powder to 
us, although we'd call that particular mixture "single-acting" baking 
powder - what we normally use adds another ingredient which releases 
CO2 when heated, and is the "double-acting" version.  We also make a 
buttermilk version which uses only baking soda, rather than baking 
powder.

>But I don't understand your use of shortcake!
>To me, shortcake is a synonym for shortbread, that *very* rich,
>buttery biscuit (British usage) particularly associated with Scotland.
>I know you mean something different, but I've never fathomed what.

Yes, for us shortbread and shortcake are two different things. 
Shortbread is the flour-butter-sugar cookie, with no leaven.  A 
shortcake is a sweet biscuit (our usage) with a little more than the 
usual amount of butter, for richness.  They're often either done in 
the round, as you describe above, or as individual drop biscuits 
(which we call "catheads," after the round-but lumpy shape and 
approximate size), as the dough is sticky and hard to roll out.

>And what do you mean by 'biscuit', anyway? Or did someone already
>explain?

"Scone," apparently!  :)

-- 
  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles at earthlink.net
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