It’s Tartan Week in New York, creating a perfect opportunity for Scottish-Americans to celebrate all aspects of their proud heritage, including food!
Scotland is well known for its culinary delights including whisky, seafood, Aberdeen Angus beef and of course its fantastic home-bakes. No trip to Scotland is complete without sampling some of the delicious baking on offer, including scones, pancakes, shortbread, oatcakes, Dundee cake, gingerbread… the list goes on and on!
At Dean’s cafe bistro here in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, one of the most popular home-bakes with our customers is without doubt our scones. Baked fresh every morning, we offer traditional plain and fruit varieties, as well as something a little different from time to time, such as our very popular coconut & cherry recipe.
So what exactly is a scone? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a scone as ‘a small unsweetened or lightly sweetened cake made from flour, fat, and milk and sometimes having added fruit’, while the American English Dictionary defines something very similar as ‘ a quick bread, made light by baking powder, soda, or yeast, and baked in small pieces’.
In North America, a biscuit is more likely to be served as part of a meal. A quick Google search for American biscuit recipes throws up lots of ways to make ‘biscuits and gravy’ – a real, homely comfort dish that appears to have its origins in the deep South. US cookery writer Ree Drummond refers to biscuits and gravy as a ‘cowboy staple’ in her blog The Pioneer Woman, where she whips up a dish of sausage and gravy over split biscuits – yum!
In her book, ‘The Art of Scottish-American Cooking’, author Kay Shaw Nelson writes ‘of all the suberb Scottish-American breads, scones are the most popular’ – and we couldn’t agree more!
So if you’ve never made your own home-made scones before, now’s your chance to indulge in some delicious Scottish home-baking!
