The Devon cream thing started because there is a move to have "Devon Cream Tea" a protected description, because there are people who serve cream teas with squirty stuff from cans, instead of proper clotted cream. The proper stuff was originally made using fresh milk direct from the cow, heated overnight over a waterbath. In my youth you could buy it in markets from huge bowls, with a lovely crust on it. Apparently, Cornwall and Devon are the only place not in the Levant where this is done, and it is suggested that the people were taught to do it by Lebanese sailors who came for the tin trade. Cream made in Cornwall is available around the UK, but does not have the proper old scalded taste. So I imitate the original process. Very rarely.
I was wrong about the scones - it's milk. When did I post it? Was it one of my late nights? Some versions use buttermilk - probably originally the stuff from butter making, not the commercial stuff. with cooking, it's sometimes hard to know what other people are going to know or use the same name for.
How do you pronounce scones? Over here there is a division between scone rhyming with stone, and scone rhyming with on. There is a national difference between Scotland and England, and a class difference. Apparently there are people who regard those who use the "other" pronunciation as being "wrong". I use the Scottish "on" version.
There is another right way, wrong way argument about how to eat the cream tea scones - does it go butter, jam, cream, or butter, cream, jam? It may depend on whether you're in Cornwall or Devon.
Today I set off for the garden with a long list of tasks, each of which depended on carrying out the previous one, and designed to end up with the summer bulbs given me by a friend's mother planted in the pot currently containing Solomon's seal from my mother's collection. I managed to top up the potato bags, lift some primulas, and remove ivy from the fence behind the shaded site for the Solomon's Seal before it started raining. Which is good, but left the garden with a heap of ivy and forsythia prunings. I saw the mouse, and the frog jumped away when I was lifting the primulas. Glad to see him - though I don't know if he is the same one I saw struggling with the frost.
Instead, I finished putting up a bookshelf rack, and added three shelves, stacking them with more books out of boxes, so I have a pile of boxes for the dump tomorrow, plus the last of the wardrobe unit. I also put all my photographs and those from Dad's into one of the Ikea boxes I got on my last trip. I've put the boxes against the wall under the shelves and stacked some other stuff on them pro tem. It's looking much more like a room now. There's still more shelving to go, but I don't expect I have enough brackets, and they aren't made any more.
Had a little snooze in the sfternoon, after salmon salad lunch.
It stopped raining, and I went out to top up the organic-not-harmful-to-anything-but-slugs slug stuff, and the beer in the slug trap. Do you have slugs and snails in your arid areas? I also pulled the forsythia bush into a more vertical position and roped it to a hook in the fence, as it had slumped over and was overwhelming a peony (sp?). I hope it manages to get used to the new position. A couple of robins came in succession to use the birdbath.
I picked some more strawberries, and noticed that the Albertine rose from my grandparents' home has really taken off and is ready to be planted out from its pot. It needs to go where there is sun as it is susceptible to mildew, which has hit another of my rescue roses which I put in the shade.