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Dessert

Fruit Scones

Fruit scones made with fat, flour, sugar, raisins, brushed with milk and egg, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Scones

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a tea biscuit mixture by combining fat, flour, sugar, and raisins.

  2. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and cut into rounds 5 to 6 inches in diameter; score each round into quarters.

  3. Brush the tops with a mixture of milk and beaten egg.

Bake

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once it is mixed and rolled.
Fat
Tenderises the dough and gives the scones a crumbly texture.
Egg
Brushed on top, it promotes browning and a glossy finish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown in the oven.
Raisins
Add sweetness and pockets of moisture throughout the scones.

The step that matters

Rolling and cutting the dough. Rolling to an even thickness helps the scones rise and bake at the same rate. Handling the dough gently keeps it tender, since overworking develops gluten and makes scones tough.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, milk, egg):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, milk, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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