A Biscuit by any other name

I've been having a hard time with this post!  Not sure which way to go as there are many ways to detour. Here goes, I hope you can follow my train of thought and don't think I'm lecturing.

The other day after posting this photo of our little campfire meal Susan commented that they, in New Zealand and Australia (and probably other parts of the world,) call these scones.  

To us this is a not a scone but a biscuit.  There is a semanitic difference. Here if you say scone you will get something flaky but much more dense and generally served at breakfast or with a cup of coffee or tea for a snack.  They can be plain, savory, sweet and with fruit floating in them.

Biscuits, on the other hand are much lighter, flakier and not dense at all if made right, usually served with supper but can be breakfast in parts of the U.S. Sometimes, if for breakfast, with a hunk of sausage in the middle. 

I am NOT the authority on scone or biscuit but there are regional differences here. A scone can be considered a biscuit, sort of, but a biscuit isn't a scone.  Kind of like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. Scones are dense, sweeter, with a flake but, well, heavier than a biscuit. A biscuit is supposed to be very light, very flaky, not sweet but definitely eaten freshly made, warm, buttered and honeyed.  Maybe jam but definitely honey.

This is not a biscuit.  This is a cookie.  I make my own but will occasionally but rarely buy Oreos to crumble them up for a certain dessert. If we are eating a cookie, I made it. 

I do occasionally, since I have been recently to England and have friends in Australia, think of them as biscuits with nostalgia but I can't CALL them that out loud because everyone would be expecting something in the second photo. 

It's one of the busiest aisles at the grocery store because there are so many varieties. Here they are cookies.

This is strawberry season so we are seeing packaged biscuits at the grocery store stocked next to the strawberries if you are so inclined to buy your strawberries from the grocery store that are shipped in from Mexico and not willing to go to a farmer for yours.  I generally say if it's summer and I am eating a fruit I picked it myself. 

Like everything else, strawberry shortcake to many people, means a biscuit like this topped with crushed fruit and whipped cream.  For me it's a piece of pound cake or angel food cake but not a biscuit.

Then there are these.  The package says they are a biscuit and for ONE thing ONLY and only once a year I use them. At Christmas my kids and grands expect monkey bread so I use these.  But they are not really a biscuit in the culinary sense.  They are pretend.

During covid I did some curiosity cooking.  Many, many of us did. Baking bread was HUGE and finding yeast and flour was sometimes a challenge.  If you found it you weren't supposed to think twice about it, you bought it. 

I read an article titled "Why Northerners Can't Make Good Biscuits."  And I thought it was just me. Flaky biscuits are synonymous with the South.

Well, it turns out Southerners make good biscuits because of the flour they use.

This brand of flour is what people in the south use, they swear by it for light, fluffy biscuits. It can't be bought north of Tennessee.  Look at the top right corner of the bag.  It says it's soft winter wheat flour.

Here in the north we grow and use hard wheat flour and hard wheat flour apparently makes denser biscuits.  Not the light fluffy ones. 

OK, I thought, I have to find some White Lily.  I asked my SIL to bring some back from Florida.  She said she couldn't find it.  I asked a friend who winters there and she couldn't find it.  I called the White Lily company and asked where in the south can my people find it?  She said a store called Publix.  My people couldn't find it in Publix.  I looked on Amazon but sometimes I just don't want to pay Amazon's inflated price for the obscure. 

Then one day I was in my grocery store, and there on the shelf was White Lily flour!  It was a supply chain thing.  They couldn't get King Arthur (the ONLY flour I use) but could source White Lily! Shelves were well stocked so I bought lots and put the bags in the freezer for future biscuits. 

I firmly believe we eat with our memory.  We remember what mom or grandma made and how it tasted to us then and we want it again now and either use their recipe or hunt down something similar.  We make whatever it is, pot roast to cookies, spaghetti sauce to those brownies and somehow it just isn't "like mom (or grandma) used to make."  Close but not the same. Our brains remember but our tummies aren't fooled.

I think the ingredients have changed.  Butter is definitely different than it was when I was a kid.  How many of our mothers and grandmothers used lard for pies, margarine or something called oleo instead of butter?  How many baked from scratch in our brains but we now find out now they opened a box of chocolate pudding, dumped it into a pie shell and called it chocolate pie? 

I have to remember when I was a kid it was the 1950s boxed, canned and frozen food was the new "in" thing and they all used them.  So, when my brother or I are reminiscing or searching for a recipe that can only come close to what we remember our first question to each other is, "did you WATCH them make it?  Did they open a boxed mix? " Because if they did we will never duplicate it.