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Dessert

Dropped Scones

Dropped scones are small, quick baked scones made with flour, buttermilk, sugar, baking soda, tartaric acid, and greased with bacon rind or suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dropped Scones

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, and tartaric acid, ensuring there are no lumps.

  2. Gradually add the buttermilk, beating well with the back of a spoon for a few minutes.

Cook on the griddle

  1. Preheat a hot griddle or iron plate and grease it with bacon rind or suet.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto the griddle, shaping them into neat rounds.

  3. When bubbles form on top, flip the scones with a broad knife.

  4. Cook until both sides are light brown, avoiding flipping them more than once.

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. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the scones together as they cook.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that react with the leavening to lighten the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid to produce gas, helping the scones rise.
Tartaric acid
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with the baking soda to produce rising gas.

The step that matters

Drop the batter onto a hot griddle and leave it alone until bubbles form. Leaveners release gas as soon as they react, so the batter should go onto a properly hot, greased griddle without delay. Turning too early or too often knocks out the bubbles and gas, leaving flat, dense scones.

“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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