Cream is thicker than blood: the rise and fall of the Devon split | Hacker News Reader

Cream is thicker than blood: the rise and fall of the Devon split

vittlesmagazine.com

62 pointsprismatic53 comments

If you have the time, and an oven you trust to run a long time, you can make your own clotted cream. Just make sure to start with cream that is not ultra-pasteurized.

The "recipe" is pretty simple. It's not even really a recipe: 1) Pour cream in pan. 2) Cook at low-temp (175-ish degrees Fahrenheit) for 12-ish hours.

I made this a couple of times during the peak of my cooking experiments during the pandemic.

It really is amazingly delicious. Maybe we should all start calling it "Devonshire cream" instead of "clotted cream". There are people that will never try it only because of the name, which is unfortunate.

Here's the recipe I followed: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/257734/chef-johns-clotted-...

Ultra-pasturized makes for a lovely rich flavor though.

Or maybe that was because I used too large a pan and it dried out too much? Or both?

It was better than what I've had in restaurants, for what it's worth.

Clotted cream is my greatest loss moving from Dartmouth, Devon to the US. A vanilla ice cream cone with clotted cream and a Cadbury flake is unparalleled. And a Mother’s Bread sandwich with clotted cream and strawberry jam being next in line.

There's clotted cream (and double cream, treacle, golden syrup, mixed spice, etc) in every major American metro I've ever been in. Look for a British import shop. Or, if you're in New England, SoCal, etc, you might just find domestically produced stuff (Gelson's in LA has it, for instance).

As someone from Cornwall, the pictures in the article don't look right. Clotted cream is much thicker; those cakes look like they're made with whipped cream.

Yeah it looks like whipped cream (chantilly) in the splits. Isn't that correct?

I think one might struggle to pipe clotted cream, or produce anything so 'elegant' with it.

It's thick, being mostly fat (often >60%). At least in Cornwall, it's often bought in plastic tubs like ice cream (it will hold its shape, not flow), not jars or bottles.

I expect not chantilly, just plain whipped cream.

Definitely whipped cream, but then it is a London bakery.

Mind you not everyone in Devon takes cream seriously. I was at Darts Farm shop outside Exeter last summer and saw a stand advertising a Devon Cream Tea with a plast pot of Rodda's!

What’s wrong with Rodda’s?

Roddas is great stuff! However, it is cornish so perhaps not appropriate for a Devon Cream Tea?

Ah!

From the article

> and the small number of dishes considered to be Devonian often involve dairy, like junket topped with clotted cream, Devonian cream tea, and the Devon (or Devonshire) split: a sweetened bun filled with whipped cream and topped with a dot of strawberry jam

Those pictures are of the splits

Clotted Cream is possibly England's greatest invention, apart from perhaps the Westminster System of government.

I suppose the railway engine is up there.... and the subway.... hmm

The system of government is an arcane disaster, unlike clotted cream.

It’s arguably now a fair bit more modern than the US system which hasn’t been meaningfully reformed since the 18th Century. For example the US president is essentially just an elected George III.

> It’s arguably now a fair bit more modern than the US system

No, its not, but the US system is also an arcane disaster, so even if it was that wouldn’t be a counterargument.

> which hasn’t been meaningfully reformed since the 18th Century.

Yes, it has been meaningfully reformed since the 18th Century. In many small ways in the 19th and 20th centuries, and with a couple whopping big ones, most notably early in the latter half of the 19th C.

> For example the US president is essentially just an elected George III.

Even if one decides not to quibble about the accuracy of that, the British still have an unelected monarch with vast estates, a real and practical veto over legislation which would effect them, and the ability to negotiate around the exercise of that power in complete unaccountable secrecy to influence legislation beyond that.

> It’s arguably now a fair bit more modern than the US system which hasn’t been meaningfully reformed since the 18th Century.

I am sorry, that is simply not true. Abolition of slavery? Votes for non-property owners? Votes for minorities? Votes for women? Votes for 18-year-olds? Incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states? Prohibition (and its repeal)? Switching from (mostly) excise taxes to income taxes to fund the government?

Those are just some of the high points.

Probably the most significant (yet rarely appreciated) change is that the Vice President is no longer the person who received the second-highest number of electoral votes.

It was realized early on what a monumentally bad idea that was.

Trump with Hillary Clinton as VP? Biden with Trump as VP? Scary indeed. One can only speculate how many more assassinations and "accidents" there would have been over the years had that not been altered.

There are other, less flashy changes that have affected the way the government works too, such as the capping of the apportionment in the House of Representatives (which also changes how presidential elections work). We haven't added any seats to it since 1929!

Not sure why you’d bring up the US, there are plenty of countries with saner systems.

Association Football is one of the most popular cultural pursuits in human history. I think it's a reasonable shout

Along with the telescope, steam engines, incandescent lights, modern firearms, electromagnets, pedal bicycles, electric clocks, chemical fertiliser, steam-powered ships, traffic lights, television, the jet engine, the programmable electronic computer, atomic clocks, carbon fibre, automatic teller machines, the lithium-ion battery, SMS text messaging, and animal cloning. I could go on!

Arguably, we could also claim the telephone and the world wide web, both invented by British engineers while abroad...

Hans Lippershey rolling in his grave right now

Hans Lippershey, patent troll ;)

(you’re correct, of course. I should have written reflecting telescope in the list above)

I buy this[1] from Indian store, my spouse loves it.

1. https://www.karouncheese.com/product/malai-breakfast-cream-s...

you can make it yourself!

just boil some raw (even pasteurized works afaik), and keep it uncovered inside the refrigerator overnight. in the morning you'll have thick malai (cream) on the top which you can scoop up and enjoy with anything.

i personally have it cold topped with crystallized sugar as a monthly treat :)

It worked back in India and my mom used to do all the time. Malai was my nemesis and I'd drink milk strained twice, just to make sure no tiny bits of malai left in milk. LOL. So naturally I never enjoyed this treat.

Oh wow. I thought this was just my personal quirk. I absolutely cannot tolerate malai in my milk. I (involuntarily) spit the milk out if the mouthful happened to have even small bits of malai.

Looks quite similar to Swedish semlor, although those are flavoured with cardamom so no doubt the flavour is quite different!

One side of my family owned a creamery in Devon for many years — probably not a surprise that heart problems were frequent.

Unquestionably one of the great inventions of the modern age.

I take issue with the repeated use of 'churn' to describe ordinary milk cans. A churn has a dasher and paddle, to turn cream into butter. Nothing described nor pictured in the article is a churn.

> A churn has a dasher and paddle, to turn cream into butter. Nothing described nor pictured in the article is a churn.

Perhaps this is a local difference in terminology? Those things the men are unloading from the train are definitely milk churns to me. I'm no dairy production expert, but I am a Devonian :)

What do you call the thing that butter is made in, then?

Reading this, I remembered that early in my childhood, we actually had a milkman delivering milk to our home a couple times a week. (In New Jersey, USA, in the 1950s)

I buy it here in California although it's expensive. I love it!

Chef John has a recipe to make it yourself if you want to invest the time. I've not done it myself, but he's usually pretty good with stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDyyAb6lB48

We love Chef John, and we recently started growing a herd of American Milking Devon cows. This breed traces its lineage directly back to Devon, but they have become extremely rare (with less than a thousand animals in existence). I can’t wait to try to make this recipe with their milk.

This is truly a Hacker News moment. Genuine. Certified. Thank you for sharing, that's awesome! Are the Devon cows extremely rare, or the American Milking Devon cows?

The Devon breed were among the very first cattle brought to the New World and were once immensely popular. The American Milking Devon breed branched off of the Red Devon lines in the mid-20th century, as the later started to move away from dual-purpose in favor of meat production.

Now, both are relatively rare in comparison to common commercial dairy and meat breeds, respectively. The margins are too thin in commodity markets to justify breeding anything but the most productive animals (e.g. Angus).

As I understand it, the original Devon breed in England remains quite popular.

Very interesting! It would make sense to sail across to the New World with the cattle breeds which were immediately available by the ports, which from the British Isles were of course mostly in Devon.

> As I understand it, the original Devon breed in England remains quite popular.

I would say that's right; you definitely see them around in Devon, where they outnumber the Holstein-Friesians which seen to otherwise dominate the European dairy cow population.

In addition to being regionally available, the Devon breeds are well-rounded triple-purpose animals; in addition to providing meat and milk, they are suitable for draft (e.g. pulling carts and plows), though you don't see them used much for that in modern times.

In the Balkans, it's called "kajmak," and it's very popular.

Update: kajmak [0] seems to be slightly different and mildly fermented.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaymak

kajmak and honey is 'chefs kiss'

I can’t eat something named “clotted cream”.

You're missing out then, it's delicious

https://www.englishteastore.com/clotted-cream-6oz.html

Can confirm, we served this stuff in our short-lived tea shop in New York and it made a huge difference in the quality of the product.

Doesn't sound great, but it is delicious.

It's just cream that's been gently heated for an extended time to denature the proteins a bit. Not all that different in spirit from fresh cheeses (though cheesemakers denature the proteins by acidification or enzymatic methods).

When I was a child in the 80s, my (Chinese) dad used to order "bean curd" in restaurants when we visited big city Chinese restaurants. I always found the name unappetizing in the extreme.

Today, of course, I love tofu.

It is perhaps for this reason that "black pudding" has the name that it does [0], rather than the more accurate "blood sausage"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding

Very tasty, surprisingly delicate if you cook it right.

The name black pudding is still enough to scare people off

a hot scone, with clotted cream and home made jam... oh boy!

(best to experience this at a farm which makes their own, nothing beats home cooking)

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