Fellow investigators,
I have engaged in a daring experiment, eating a food which is reported to be luscious but has an off-putting, almost disgusting name, which is: clotted cream. I presume any of you who have lived in England may have met this stuff, hm?
What got me interested was hearing a couple of ex-pat Brits raving about how wonderful it was the other day, during a morning radio show from DC. (It was a podcast, of course, as I am not up at such a time of day.)
According to them, the most typical use of clotted cream -- I looked it up on Wikipedia to get some idea of what it is -- is apparently on scones with strawberry jam, a dish called Cream Tea, so I set out today to get the ingredients.
A leading Internet seller of the stuff is located in Westford, MA, so I went to their shop and picked up a jar, and some jam. Nice enough. The same shop offers scone mix, but as I'm a lazy person (cf. Perl programmer), I passed it up in the hope of finding some already made.
A Panera Bread shop did have some scones, but not plain ones, just frosted ones with various fruits. It didn't seem appealing to add jam and a shmear on top of that.
Anyway, to the actual test:
The cream jar's label claimed that it was the ideal topping for berries, so I had some on raspberries, and was a bit disappointed. The stuff has a consistency like whipped butter, and putting something that heavy on raspberries wasn't a good match. It just wasn't easy to apply product A to fruit B. Besides, the non-sweet flavor of the cream was not that interesting a companion for sweet raspberries just passing their peak.
On the other hand, I had some on a Panera plain bagel, with jam, and found it just delightful there. Context is everything.
Continuing the quest for knowledge (of food), I am, yours fraternally,
I've often seen this called "Devon cream," a bit more palatable term! "Clotted cream - yes, may I have that with some scab-covered scones and raspberry ooze, please?"
Devon/clotted cream is incredible stuff. NOT good for diet fare.