Scone

Pumpkin scones, made by adding mashed cooked pumpkin to the dough mixture, had increased exposure during the period when Florence Bjelke-Petersen was in the public eye.[17][18] Date scones, which contain chopped dried dates, can also be found in Australia. Another old style of cooking scones, generally in the colder months, is to deep-fry or deep pan-fry them in dripping or oil, when they are called "puftaloons".

In Hungary, a pastry very similar to the British version exists under the name "pogácsa". The name has been adopted by several neighbouring nations' languages. (E.g. Pogatsche in German.) Pogácsa is almost always savoury and served with varied seasonings and toppings, like dill and cheese.

Cheese scones are a popular snack sold in cafes or tea shops, where they are commonly served toasted with butter.[19] They are featured in the Edmonds Cookery Book and make up a part of kiwiana.

Scones are commonly served with clotted cream and jam; grated cheddar cheese is another popular accompaniment.

Scones are quite popular in Argentina as well as Uruguay. They were brought there by Irish, English and Scottish immigrants and by Welsh immigrants in Patagonia (Britons are the third largest foreign community in Argentina).[20] They are usually accompanied by tea, coffee or mate.

Round British scones superficially resemble North American biscuits in appearance, but they have a very different history that is unrelated to the Scottish bannock, and actually North American biscuits have hardtack as a direct ancestor, also known as a "seabiscuit" : this was a type of cracker made of lard and flour that became standard issue to the British Navy under the reign of Elizabeth I. The word "biscuit" is used in part because of its ancestor's name of "seabiscuit," but also because American English already has a word for a dry, sweet baked good, taken from Dutch: cookie.

It was very common for emigrants from England in the 17th century, those who bought passage to the New World through indentured servitude, to have simple meals of wheat warmed over with a milk based gravy.[21] In both cases, liquid was used to soften the often hard-as-nails comestible that would keep for long periods of time, the Royal Navy typically using grog or straight rum.[22]. The hardtack would have been traded in the Thirteen Colonies along with other finished goods, and over time it evolved.

The present day recipe is some combination of buttermilk or milk, plain flour, salt, and butter, margarine, or shortening. They can either be rolled into a dough and cut into rounds to create a flaky texture or, provided more liquid is added, can become a batter that creates "drop biscuits." Other recipes include cheddar cheese to make cheese biscuits. [23] Unlike British scones, in all Southern biscuits, the butter or shortening is room temperature, not cold, and shortening based on cotton seed ( traditionally Crisco) or margarine are acceptable.[16] Either baking powder or bicarbonate soda are the leavening agents and no recipe for Southern biscuits has ever included yeast.

British scones are frequently (but not always) sweet, and served with coffee and tea. For Southern biscuits, however, they were never intended for tea time as there was no such thing as afternoon tea or high tea even in the middle of the Victorian Era for most of the population: the majority of Americans worked sunrise to sunset as farmers, ranch hands, and slaves in the countryside. The rest worked as shopkeepers, tradesmen, or labourers in the cities, with no city yet large enough in population to rival the much more powerful London; Atlanta itself had a population of less than 10,000.[24] New York's population was under a million and would not match the population of London in 1860 until 1900.[25]

Any sugar added is inauthentic and not true to the biscuit's history. During the American Civil War, the nation was hugely divided with the eleven states of the South and the Midwest, Northeast, and California at each other's throats ideologically and quite literally, evidenced by fortification of rivers where many states had natural borders and both Richmond and Washington DC themselves heavily barricaded along the Potomac and James Rivers. Union strategy was to blow up railroad tracks to stymie Confederate supply lines.[26] Getting sugar of any kind was nearly impossible and yeast to leaven bread became scarce; at one point, because of the actions of General Sherman, large swathes of Georgia faced starvation as he burned most of the crops to terrorize the people into yielding to the Union soldiers (and the enormous following of freed slaves) on the march.[27] [28] Improvisation was a must, and so bicarbonate of soda or baking powder became the sole leavening agents used in the recipe for Southern biscuits and forevermore the door was slammed shut on them ever being sweetened.

Today, Southern biscuits are a staple of the cuisine of the American South, served warm and sliced horizontally for breakfast with butter, fruit jam or honey, with tupelo honey or clover honey being the favourites. Southern biscuits are essential to a variation on the breakfast roll that often involves scrambled eggs with tomato, streaky bacon or salty country ham[29]. They are a component of biscuits and gravy, a direct descendant of the same English dish for the poor and eaten for breakfast with bits of breakfast sausage. Biscuits are also eaten at lunch or dinner as an accompaniment to nearly all kinds of American barbecue, fried chicken, Lowcountry cuisine, and are a necessary part of the Southern version of Thanksgiving.

In recent years, scones under that name have begun to appear in coffee houses. They may be sweet, often containing fruit such as blueberries or sultanas, or else such flavorings as cinnamon or chocolate chips. US "scones" are usually actually closer to British Rock cakes. They are heavy, dry and crumbly, usually in a triangular or irregular shape.

In Utah and southern Idaho, the bread products locally called "scones" are similar to Native American frybread or New Orleans beignets and are made from a sweet yeast dough, with buttermilk and baking powder or soda added, and they are fried rather than baked. They are customarily served with butter and either honey or maple syrup.[30]