Column

The other day I went with a friend to the Bandra Saltwater Grill at around tea time. I have always been a fan of the Saltwater Grill at Chowpatty, sadly no more, and so I thought (foolishly as it turned out) that this was bound to be a chip of the old block.

Instead of tea we ordered some smoothies which were uniformly dreadful, for reason one cannot begin to explain. But this was unfortunately a presentiment of things to come.

Out of a sense of misplaced nostalgia, we ordered scones with cream and preserves, delightful term “preserves”. The quintessentially English cream tea (without any tea) was expected. It did not do my friend Riyaz Amlani justice. The scones were tasteless and stale. There was no strawberry jam, but some repulsive sticky orangey substance which looked rather like pus oozing from an afflicted body. To top it all, was a cream which appeared, tasted and had the texture of shaving cream. When asked what it was, it turned out to be whipped cream from a packet and not one which had been whipped from fresh cream.

One of the great gastronomic experiences — moist scones, golden clotted cream with cardinal red jam replete with luscious strawberries — had been reduced to a miserable and sad shadow of itself.

This experience forced me to think, scones are not difficult to make and great jam one can always buy. At Nature’s Basket you can pick up Bonne Maman, a rather good French jam. Otherwise there are excellent jams produced by Bhuria in Himachal. But what about the cream?

This is an interesting issue. In England the cream used is what is known as clotted cream, distinguished by its deep yellow colour and high fat content, (at around 65 per cent it is obscenely rich).The method for making it is to put whole milk in a shallow pan until the cream has risen (in summer around 12 hours), then heat the cream to about 82oC (180oF) keep it there and let it cool overnight.

It is suggested by Alan Davidson in his Oxford Companion to Food that, though this technique is identified with pastoral Devon and Cornwall, it is actually an example of cross fertilisation of culinary techniques.

According to him it was introduced by the Phoenicians to Cornwall 2000 years ago when they came to buy tin, as it resembles the Middle Eastern kaymak, a popular cream used for pastries in Turkey and Lebanon. Both these techniques involve the cooking of the cream; one of our great milk desserts which involves cooking milk, rabdi, stops after the milk is boiled overnight, thus rabdi is runny, whereas clotted cream and kaymak have a grainy solid texture, a bit like butter.

If you cannot get clotted cream, what do you do short of importing it? According to Rowley Leigh, the Brits export 60,000 tons of cream every year, so that is an option. A cheaper solution is to use Parsi Dairy Farm cream (the only double cream available) and physically whip it with a balloon whip, once it becomes suitably thick, you refrigerate it.

Never use single cream as it is not fatty enough. The process is enhanced if you use chilled cream, as that whips better than room temperature cream. For the restaurateur there is the added advantage that by whipping it increases in volume. Happy whipping!