When it comes to scones, there are two kinds of people: those who put the cream on first, and those who are wrong.
There’s a peculiar breed of culinary anarchist who believes it’s perfectly acceptable to slather jam directly onto a bare scone.
The same people, I suspect, who pour milk in before removing the teabag, or worse, make tea in a microwave. They should all be exiled to Greggs.
Now, at first glance, this might seem like one of those trivial British squabbles, like the correct way to queue (with passive-aggressive glares and a deep tutting at miscreants if you're wondering).
But no, this is a matter of optics, of architecture.
You see, spreading jam on a naked scone is an act of premature celebration.
It denies the entire ritual, a ritual of decadence and anticipation, deserving the solemnity of a religious ceremony.
The cream is a luxurious underlay, creating elevation to platform the jam, if you will.
Without it, the jam becomes smeared into oblivion, vanishing into the crumb like a damp sponge in a sink.
It’s a textbook case of framing. The cream is a canvas and the jam is the artwork.
Reverse them and you might as well hang the Mona Lisa upside down in the loo.
Applying the jam first shows a reckless disregard for morality. Only a sociopath would do that.
This is not culinary snobbery. Rather, it’s about managing expectation bias. The Cornish method (jam first) suggests a scarcity of cream but the Devonian way (cream first) screams abundance.
The Cornish method whispers of rationing, the Devonian way roars of indulgence.
It's luxury psychology 101.
Perception is, after all, nine-tenths of reality and do you really want to look unhinged?
But, of course, if you want to continue doing it wrong, be my guest.
I suppose it will be easier to identify the 4% of sociopaths in the population if you do.