Spread the strawberry jam, dollop that clotted cream on a crumbly scone and serve it up with a perfect cup of tea to celebrate the UK’s National Cream Tea Day, says Kevin Pilley.
Cornwall and Devon and clotted cream trip off the tongue. And not just at Queen’s, Eastbourne and Wimbledon tennis time.
Clotted cream is not an exclusively summer thing. It’s an all-year-round high calorific and inimitable treat. Tolkien’s hobbits, who adored clotted cream, knew that.
One tub is a team effort. It involves herds of Jerseys, Ayrshire and Holstein cows working in tandem with southwesterly sea breezes, a sub-tropical climate and high in beta-carotene grass, several old farming families, an ice-cream empire based in Bodmin, the UK’s first carbon-neutral farm, a dairy near Lostwithel and a 120-year-old farmhouse creamery in Sorrier, Redruth.
A. E. Rodda & Son (“Rodda’s”) is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Cornish clotted cream’s POG (Protected Designation of Origin) status. It took five years to be accorded. Cornish clotted cream is now as precious and protected as champagne, Stilton cheese and Parma ham. True Cornish clotted cream must be made from unpasteurised Cornish milk and have no more than 55 per cent fat. The fat content in single cream is 18 per cent.
Clotted cream is consumedin many ways – on scones, over beef stroganoff, lattice fruit tarts, puddings and pies and in lattes, mochas, hot chocolate, fudge and hollandaise.
And now in gin.
Tintagel’s Wrecking Coast distillery produces Clotted Cream Gin in 70cl, 44 per cent, £35.95 and miniature form.
Using ‘Rodda’ milk, the small-batch micro-distillery is run by four friends Avian Sandercock, Daniel Claughton, Steve Wharton and Craig Penn. Camelford artists and gallery owner John Blight provide the artwork on the bottles.
Says Penn: “We macerate 12 botanicals in grain spirit for a fortnight before running through a computer-controlled iStill. Rodda clotted cream is cold distilled in a vacuum still before the two spirits are blended together. It’s great with a strawberry quarter garnish.”
Present boss Nick Rodda’s great-great-grandmother, Eliza Jane, started the business in her kitchen in 1890. By 1920 her produce was being sent by train to London and stocked in Harrod’s and Fortnum & Mason. The farm only had 12 cows so Willie Rodda used to buy milk off local farmers.
Says Rodda: “We sell over 300 million dollops a year! My great-uncle Eric died when he was 99. And he had clotted cream on his cornflakes every morning.
“It’s part of the Great Britain package. The quintessentially British experience.”
For a long time, Rodda’s cream was made over Primus stoves. By the 1970s, having diversified into turkey breeding and skimmed milk, clotted cream was being sent through the post in insulated bags and served on airlines. Even on Concorde. It was served on its last flight.
It’s part of the Great Britain package. The quintessentially British experience
Rodda buys over 100,000 litres of milk daily. Many farmers are involved. Trewithen Dairy is run by the Clark family at Greymare farm. Bill and Rachel and sons, Francis and George, describe themselves as “dairy farmers-turned-diary-product-producers”. Francis used to make and pot her own clotted cream.
“Our cows are happy and healthy!” says Rachel.
They are supplied by local farmers, like Jane and Mark Rowe of Tresowes Farm, Helston. Says Jane: “We’re Cornish and proud of it. It’s great to see the end products of a small business going around the world and being enjoyed by so many.”
Rodda’s clotted cream is exported to 15 countries including UAE.
Rodda’s acquired Definitely Devon in 2011. The Harvey family’s Langage Farm in Higher Challonsleigh, Smithaleigh, is now Devon’s leading clotted cream producer. It is also behind a campaign to grant POD status to Devon Cream teas. The names on the petition are mounting.
Mentioned as a working farm in the Domesday Book, only in 1980 did it start producing clotted cream. Now it also sells pouring cream, cottage cheese, yoghurts and ice creams in 40 flavours. It boasts a pioneering Anaerobic Digest facility – an innovative and low-energy digestate drying process creating fertiliser. The renewable electricity and heat help reduce the factory’s carbon footprint.
Similar to Middle-Eastern kaymak, Cornwall’s signature buttercup yellow-tinged clotted cream was originally made by farmers to reduce the amount of waste from their milk. In the 11th century the monks at Tavistock Abbey allegedly paid workers with clotted cream, strawberry jam and bread in the rebuild after a Viking raid. The poet Spenser mentions “curd and clouted cream” in his 1579 Shepheardes Calendar. The 1658The Compleat Cook includes the first recipe.
In the 19th century, ‘scalded’ cream wasn’t regarded as sinful and preferable to cream which was liable to go sour. It was used in butter-making. The infamous thick and ‘highly dollopable’ cream is made by heating strained full-cream cow’s milk using steam or a water bath and then leaving it in shallow pans to cool so the cream content rises to the surface and forms ‘clots’ or ‘clouts’. These were skimmed off with a long-handled cream-skimmer, known in Devon as a ‘raimer’ or ‘reamer’. Now the cream is separated centrifugally.
Clotted cream is also a cottage industry in Dorset, Somerset, Herefordshire, Pembrokeshire and the Isle of Wight. But West Country clotted cream is the finest. The best of the best.
It is used in regional specialities like Thunder and Lightning (bread also topped with golden syrup, honey or treacle), Cornish Whoopie Pie’ (chocolate and vanilla) and Hedgehog (an ice-cream waffle cone with chocolate chips).
It is also used in Kelly’s of Cornwall Ice Cream, which has 50 parlours around the county offering an array of weird and wonderful flavours.
June 29 is National Cream Tea Day in the UK. Summer is high season. 86,000 ice creams are sold at Wimbledon every year. 10,000 litres of cream and 28 tonnes of picked-on-the-same-day Kent strawberries are consumed.
Strawberries and cream were served at the first All-England Club tournament in 1877. The pairing is thought to have been the idea of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Twining’s opened the first teahouse in 1706. Coffeehouses were male-only.
Clotted cream may be a veryold culinary tradition but it has gone high-tech. After exhaustive research, boffins from the University of Sheffield have revealed that the ideal Cornish clotted cream tea must consist of a four to seven centimetre diametre scone (sometimes called a ‘split’ or, in Devon, a ‘Chudleigh’) in order to leave room around the edge to avoid spillage and laundry bills. The perfect scone/jam, cream weight ratio is 2:1:1.
The jam or conserve preferred by The Cream Tea Society is Wilkin & Sons’ Little Scarlet made in Tiptree, Essex since 1885.
The word scone may come from the Gaelic ‘sgonn’, meaning ‘large mouthful’. Or, more probably, from the Dutch ‘schoonbrood’ – quick, spoon bread.
Controversy still rages whether the jam should be put on first (the Devon and Commonwealth way) or, as in Cornwall and London, on top of and covering the clotted cream.
There is also a clotted cream strict etiquette. The Clotted Cream Police will be watching for faux pas at Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta.
As Nick Rodda reminds everyone: “You must break your scone. Cutting it is considered improper.”