Cream, Devonshire
The milk should stand 24 hours in the winter, half that time when the weather is very warm.
The milk-pan is then set on a stove, and should there remain until the milk is quite hot; but it must not boil, or there will be a thick skin on the surface. When it is sufficiently done the undulations on the surface look thick, and small rings appear.
The time required for scalding cream depends on the size of the pan and the heat of the fire, but the slower it is done the better. The pan should be placed in the dairy when the cream is sufficiently scalded, and skimmed the following day. This cream is so much esteemed that it is sent to the London markets in small square tins, and is exceedingly delicious eaten with fresh fruit. In Devonshire, butter is made from this cream, and is usually very firm.
This is clotted cream, described from the dairy side rather than the kitchen: whole milk left to separate, then scalded in the pan so the risen cream sets into a thick crust. Everything hinges on heat that is high enough to clot and low enough never to bubble.
- Start with cream, not raw milkThe original assumes a shallow pan of unpasteurized milk standing at cellar temperature until the cream rises. Homogenized supermarket milk will never separate. Use pasteurized (not ultra-pasteurized) heavy cream, which skips the standing stage entirely; if you do let raw milk rise, do it under refrigeration rather than on a counter, as 24 hours at room temperature is where the old dairies took their risks.
- What "quite hot" meansScalding for clotted cream is 175-180F held for a long stretch, well below the 212F that would form the skin the recipe warns against. A thermometer replaces reading the undulations and small rings on the surface.
- The oven does it better than the stove"The slower it is done the better" is the real instruction. Pour cream 1.5 to 2 inches deep into a wide shallow dish and hold it in a 175-180F oven for 8 to 12 hours, uncovered and undisturbed. Do not stir at any point.
- "Placed in the dairy"A dairy was a cool room, usually stone-floored and kept well below kitchen temperature. Chill the pan uncovered in the refrigerator overnight instead; the crust must set cold before it can be lifted.
- SkimmingLift the set crust off in sheets with a slotted spoon or wide skimmer, leaving the thin liquid beneath. That liquid is not waste, and can go into scones or bread.
- YieldThe original gives none. Roughly 4 cups of heavy cream yields 1.5 to 2 cups of clotted cream, enough for six to eight servings alongside fruit or scones.
- The butter noteClotted cream will churn to butter, but because it has been cooked it gives a firm, faintly nutty result quite unlike sweet-cream butter. The original notes only that the Devonshire butter made from it is 'usually very firm'.
- KeepingNo preservative is involved. Refrigerate and use within about four days; it does not can.
Clotted cream belongs to the wet, pasture-rich south-west of England, where scalding the cream in the pan served as a preservation technique as much as producing a delicacy: cooking the cream extended its life in a dairy with no ice. The note that it "is sent to the London markets in small square tins" is the interesting part, and points to the railway age, when Devon and Cornwall could get perishable goods to the capital quickly and clotted cream reached a market well beyond its own counties. Both counties have long claimed it, and Cornish clotted cream now holds a European protected designation of origin, awarded in 1998; the Devonshire version, which this recipe describes, has no equivalent protection.