The Delightfully Posh Way Queen Elizabeth Measured Ingredients For Her Favorite Scones

Scones (which are not the same as biscuits) are a cornerstone of British cuisine, so it's only proper that Queen Elizabeth had her own signature recipe for the classic teatime treats. The late monarch shared her drop scone recipe with President Dwight D. Eisenhower after whipping up the Windsor family favorite for the American politician in 1959. The delightfully simple royal recipe is now safely stashed in the National Archives. Queen Elizabeth's drop scone recipe uses just seven ingredients and includes a mere four lines of instructions. However, the royal recipe does require one somewhat special kitchen tool — a teacup.

In addition to butter, eggs, cream of tartar, baking soda, and caster sugar, Queen Elizabeth's instructions call for 4 teacups of flour and 2 teacups of milk. It's no secret that the British take tea seriously, so perhaps it's no surprise that the Queen of England considered the teacup a standard unit of measurement. However, if you're looking for more exact numbers, a British teacup seems to be relatively similar to an American cup (of course, any kind of cup is an inexact way to measure baking ingredients, which is why you should just buy a kitchen scale already).

It's undeniably delightful to imagine Queen Elizabeth carefully measuring out level teacups of flour and milk for a batch of her favorite drop scones. However, it also begs the question: Is a teacup really a common way to measure ingredients in the United Kingdom, or did the British monarch generously Americanize her recipe for President Eisenhower by avoiding the metric system? The rest of the drop scone ingredients are measured in teaspoons and tablespoons (which aren't exactly the same around the world), so the recipe could be followed by Americans and Brits alike, no conversions necessary.

While it's possible that Queen Elizabeth was simply being diplomatic by using teacups rather than grams, a teacup was a relatively common unit of measurement in many old-school British recipes. As such, it's quite likely that Queen Elizabeth really did measure out her drop scone ingredients in what we can only imagine are incredibly elegant royal teacups. In modern British recipes, teacups have largely been replaced by much more standard and easy-to-follow metric measurements. Still, what the teacup lacks in accuracy it more than makes up for in charm, and it's certainly a unit of measurement fit for a queen.