Teddy Roosevelt Couldn't Get Enough Of This British Breakfast

Many of you are probably familiar with the full English breakfast — the big, greasy fry-up of sausages, eggs, bacon, beans, and tomato. But that's hardly the only British-style breakfast out there, and one lighter, sweeter option caught the attention of none other than President Theodore Roosevelt. This dish was called a "fat rascal," and it's somewhere between a scone, a biscuit, and a rock cake — a small fruit cake that's often served with tea. Roosevelt often began his mornings with fat rascals, served with butter, jam, a hard-boiled egg, and copious amounts of coffee.

Considering Roosevelt's reputation for preferring simple American food (and fat rascals being obviously non-American), how did they end up on his breakfast plate? It was most likely the doing of his wife, Edith Roosevelt, who had a much-loved recipe for them. The fat rascal is most commonly linked to Yorkshire in northern England. They're sometimes called "turf cakes" or "turf buns," and they originated around the mid-1800s, where they were baked over peat fires in the seaside town of Whitby.

If you're hoping to live a little like Roosevelt, fat rascals aren't a difficult thing to bake yourself at home. The basic dough uses pretty standard ingredients: flour, butter, baking powder, sugar, salt, eggs, and milk. Of course, since it's a British baked good, some recipes will call for items that are not quite so common in the U.S., such as caster sugar (aka superfine sugar) or homemade self-rising flour.

The flavors in fat rascals vary — the Roosevelt version kept things incredibly simple by adding currants (although they're served with jam and butter). However, British recipes will more often spice things up with dried fruit, orange and lemon zest, cinnamon, and nutmeg all mixed in, plus almonds and candied cherries on top. The method is pretty similar to scones, with flour and cold butter being mixed into a crumb, making a soft, buttery final product. They also tend to be larger than standard English-style scones. 

Alternatively, if you're headed to the U.K., you can try a fat rascal at a Yorkshire tea room called Bettys. In fact, Bettys registered a trademark on the name. So, technically speaking, it's the only place you can get a true fat rascal — but surely nobody would mind that a former U.S. president used the name to describe his beloved breakfast.