Devonshire Splits

A Devonshire split is a Sunday afternoon in bun form. Pale, soft, faintly sweet, dusted with icing sugar, and split open to take a wedge of clotted cream and a heaped spoon of jam. There's nothing complicated about them. There never was. They were the original cream tea bread, made all over the West Country before scones took over the conversation, and to my mind they're the better of the two. A scone is dry without its filling. A split is tender on its own and transformed by it.

The order matters. In Devon, the cream goes on first and the jam sits on top. In Cornwall, it's the other way round. People take this seriously, and so they should. I'm not here to start a war, but if you're calling these Devonshire Splits then the cream goes first. Those are the rules of the room.

Make them on a Saturday afternoon when the kitchen has time and the weather has turned soft, the kind of day when the rain is steady and there's nowhere you have to be. The dough is forgiving. The shaping is gentle. The bake is short. And the moment when you carry a plate of them to the table, still dusted in sugar, the cream cool against the warm bun, the jam catching the light, is one of the few things in cooking I'd call quietly perfect.

I wrote it down in the notebook last June: "Splits. Strawberry jam from the market. Rain on the window. Three each." That was the whole entry. Some afternoons don't need more than that.