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Dessert

Barley Scones

Barley scones are baked dough made with barley meal, milk, and water, served hot with salt butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Barley Scones

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk and 1 pint of water in a pan.

  2. Gradually stir in barley meal until the mixture is thick.

  3. Sprinkle dry meal on a baking board and turn the dough out onto it.

  4. Knead the dough as little as possible and roll it out thin.

Cook and serve

  1. Cut the dough into rounds and toast them on a hot griddle.

  2. Serve the scones hot with salt butter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + barleytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Barley + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Barley meal
Forms the thick dough and gives the scones their main body and flavour.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the dough and helps it brown lightly on the griddle.
Water
Adds moisture with the milk, helping the barley meal form a soft, workable dough.

The step that matters

Knead the dough as little as possible. Barley meal has little gluten, so overworking gives no extra structure and can make the scones tough. Light handling keeps them tender.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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