Cross-cultural food experiment

| 2 Comments

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,

Bookmark and Share

2 Comments

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.

Leave a comment

What? Who?

On life and living in communion with the Catholic Church.



John Schultz


You write, we post
unless you state otherwise.

Archives

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Richard Chonak published on July 16, 2007 11:13 PM.

Get up, stand up was the previous entry in this blog.

Psst... get your Liber here! is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.