Clotted cream crisis

Fearing that the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. may carry over to our shores, the U.S. government has apparently put the kibosh on imports of the English necessity clotted cream.

And that has English specialty stores, restaurants and tea houses in a tizzy, saying their newfound clotted-cream circumstances are as desperate as London's during the Blitz.

Take Nicky Perry, mother hen to New York City's British expats at Tea & Sympathy, which she says buys up more clotted cream in a week than everyone else in the U.S. put together buys in a year. When she tried to put in her regular order of clotted cream this afternoon and heard about the ban for the first time, she had to scramble to fill her stores. Even after making calls to stores as far away as California, she estimates she has only enough clotted cream to last T&S another 10 days.

"It's really a desperate situation, because whipping heavy cream just doesn't cut the mustard, so to speak," she says. "I've already told all the staff, 'You have to cut it back. If they ask for more, give them more, but we have to make it last.' It's really like wartime rations."

Indeed, an unofficial rationing system may already be forming among Perry and her fellow British restaurateurs, with everyone across the country who's been affected getting a much-reduced piece of the clotted-cream action.

Perry's distributor, New Jersey-based Epicure Foods Corp., is less dramatic, calmly saying that a similar ban a couple years back was probably more serious (but then again, co-owner Jennifer Drezga's a Yank). The hold-up, as Drezga explains it, is that the British government isn't providing the very rigorous certification that the U.S. Customs Service and the FDA are now requiring for U.K. dairy products. Still, she says, it could be a month, six months or a year or more before British expats and American Anglophiles get their clotted cream again.

"Word of mouth is there maybe something in November, but you just don't know," Drezga says.

It sounds like Perry might not be able to last even that long without her clotted cream.

"People in the store are looking at me like, 'Is that woman mad?'" she says. "There are going to be a lot of very disappointed cream lovers very soon."

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