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Devonshire Clotted Cream
The highly esteemed clotted cream of Devonshire is procured by straining the milk, as it comes fresh from the cow, into large metal pans, which are placed in a cool dairy, and kept unmoved for twenty-four hours in winter and half that time in summer. It is then scalded over a charcoal fire, the time for scalding depending on the heat of the fire and the quantity of milk to be scalded; the slower it is done, the better and the thicker will be the cream. It is skimmed the following day. A great quantity of this cream is sent to the London market, where it fetches a high price.
This is a dairy process rather than a dish, written for a farmhouse with a cool stone dairy and a charcoal brazier. The method still works, but almost every material condition has changed.
- Start with the right cream, not milkThe recipe depends on whole raw milk separating overnight into a deep cream layer. Homogenised supermarket milk will never do this. Use pasteurised heavy or double cream of at least 36% fat, and avoid ultra-pasteurised (UHT) cream, which does not clot reliably.
- Raw milk and the standing timeTwelve to twenty-four hours of unrefrigerated standing was normal in what the book calls simply a cool dairy. If you are working with raw milk today, keep it refrigerated throughout, and be aware that some bacterial toxins that develop during warm standing are not destroyed by later heating.
- What "scalded" meansNot boiled. The target is roughly 175-180F (80-82C) held for a long stretch, long enough for the fat to rise and the surface to set into a wrinkled buff crust. A boil ruins the texture and gives a cooked, sulphurous flavour.
- Replacing the charcoal fireCharcoal gave slow, steady, bottom-only heat. The modern equivalents are an oven set to 175-180F for 8 to 12 hours in a wide shallow dish, or a water bath on the lowest burner. The book is right that slower is better and thicker.
- Do not move the panThe recipe's 'kept unmoved' applies to the settling period, when the cream rises. Agitation is best avoided at the scalding stage too, since stirring or tilting disturbs the setting surface. Set the pan down once and leave it.
- The overnight chill before skimming"Skimmed the following day" means after a full cooling in the cold. Chill the pan undisturbed for at least 8 hours, then lift the clotted layer off in sheets with a slotted spoon.
- Depth of the panThe recipe specifies only large metal pans; settling pans of this kind were characteristically wide and shallow. Reproduce that: a deep narrow pot gives a thin crust over a lot of unclotted liquid.
- Yield and the leftoversFour cups of heavy cream give roughly 1.5 to 2 cups of clotted cream. The thin liquid beneath is not waste; use it in scones, soda bread or custard.
- KeepingRefrigerate and use within about four days. It has no preservative and no acid, and the long warm hold does not make it shelf-stable.
Clotted cream is the signature product of the high-butterfat cattle of south-west England, and the scalding technique described here is old enough that its origins are undocumented, though it is generally traced to the need to extend the life of cream in a region with no ice. The closing line about the London market is telling: by the later nineteenth century the railways had made it possible to send crocks of Devonshire cream up to town, where scarcity commanded a premium. The West Country claim to the product has since been formalised, Cornish clotted cream having been granted protected designation of origin status under the European scheme in 1998, with a minimum butterfat content written into the specification.