[Sca-cooks] Clotted Cream

[Terry Decker]

> Here, this might give you some ideas:
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/news_features/2004/tavistock_cream_tea.shtml
> <<<
>
> Hmmm. The article keeps mentioning "Devon cream tea". What's the 
> connection between clotted cream and tea? or "cream tea"?
>

The "cream tea" is a scone-like critter served with clotted cream and jam at 
tea-time.

> The article also mentions "the monks fed them with bread, clotted  cream 
> and strawberry preserves.". Huh? The time for this was given as  roughly 
> 11th Century. Strawberries? In our earlier discussions I  thought the only 
> strawberries were from the Alps and they were much  smaller than today's 
> hybrid strawberries. The Alps are quite a  distance from Tavistock. And 
> how would they have been preserved?  Honey? That's too early for sugar and 
> other info tends to point to  quince as the first fruit preserves.

Wild strawberries are found all over Europe and the Americas and have been 
gathered wild for millenia.  Around the 15th Century, strawberries started 
being transplanted to kitchen gardens all over Europe.  What you are 
thinking of is a particular species found only in the Alps.

>
> And even disregarding the above, how do they get from "bread, clotted 
> cream and strawberry preserves" to a clotted cream with strawberries 
> mixed in? Or is this really meant as clotted cream served with  strawberry 
> preserves at something like tea-time?
>
> Stefan

You got close on that last one.  The Devon cream tea is the dish of a type 
of bread served with clotted cream and jam.  What you have here is a case of 
transference and usage.  The name "cream tea" bit is probably no earlier 
than the 17th Century, while the antecedants of the dish are at least 500 
years earlier.

Bear