There are a lot of things Britain does well. Tea. Reality television. Weddings.
But there's one thing Brits do better than anything else, and that's clotted cream.
Clotted cream is the most delicious thing in the world. Or, to put it more technically: it's a dairy product made by heating unpasteurized milk slowly in a shallow pan until the cream rises to the surface and thickens, or clots. The milk is left to cool, and the creamy top is skimmed off and collected as clotted cream.
If you're thinking: How good could it be? It sounds similar to whipped cream or butter?—stop. Just stop. Clotted cream is better than both of those things because clotted cream is ceremonious. It's essential to cream tea, the late-afternoon meal that's customary in Devon and Cornwall (in Devon clotted cream is sometimes referred to as Devonshire cream). And in America, clotted cream is served anywhere that is extra enough to serve a proper high tea—in other words, at expensive hotels you only visit once a year, around Christmas, with your richest aunt.
Clotted cream has the richness of butter but the creaminess of whipped cream. As my colleague Anya put it, "it's everything you love about whipped cream, but better because it's thick." It's thick enough to sit on top of a scone rather than sink in; in that way, it creates the perfect bed for a layer of jam. (Though apparently there is some county-to-county discrepancy between Devon and Cornwall about the right order of application: jam first, then cream, or cream first then jam.)
You can also drop a spoonful onto a steaming bowl of oatmeal and, as Nigella Lawson suggests, "drizzle Lyle's Golden Syrup over it for the most luxurious, over-the-top, far-from-everyday breakfast." It's served with berries in the summer, on apple pie and sticky toffee pudding in the winter, and generally goes with any dessert where you want a little richness to cut through the sweetness. And in Devon and Cornwall—the southwestern corner of England where clotted cream purportedly originated—you'll sometimes see clotted cream as a topper for clotted cream ice cream.
It's not an essential, multi-purpose ingredient—you don't cook with clotted cream, you can really only garnish with it. But then again, versatility has never been its calling card. You should stock clotted cream to make things taste more special, more pleasurable, more weekend-in-the-British-countryside. As for the logistics of stocking it, well, it's not easy. It can be difficult to find in America. Luckily, in yet another mark of its superiority over butter and cream, clotted cream travels remarkably well.
The Devon Cream Company Clotted Cream
Clotted cream is our favorite British ingredient for making a bowl of oatmeal or a scone feel truly next-level.
