A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell says:
So what’s the deal with cream, anyway? Don’t they take it off and sell it seperately? Or is cream a constituent of non-skim milk?
(Of course, things might have been different back when the article was written. My milk has always come in cardboard boxes or plastic jugs.)
Back in the way back when, not all milk was homogenized, which mixes the cream into the milk so that it won’t separate out. All non-skim milk contains cream.
So the cream won’t come out of suspension in homogenized milk?
Orwell said in his piece that “Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.” Is this true with homogenized milk? (I always use non-fat.)
Well, Orwell was a liiiiiittle opinionated on this matter , and not necessarily to be thought of as an impartial authority.
But no, the fat in homogenized milk seldom comes out of suspension. Certain conditions may alter that; your mileage may vary. But it’s unusual.
I guarantee that if you experiment with standard tea add-ons, testing to see what you like, you will come to no harm whatever!
My husband drinks very strong tea with half-and-half and sugar, and has never experienced the famous “sickly taste”. His response to Orwell’s question, “How can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it?”:
"Like this: ‘I am a true tealover!’ "
And no, he does not drink tea only “in order to be warmed and stimulated;” he really enjoys it that way.
Thanks, all. I read some older stuff occasionally, and such simple taken-as-granted things like that there was cream that rose to the top of milk makes me wonder exactly what was going on. Of course I took them as granted and continues reading. But thanks to The Straight Dope, I can now get clarification.
There is a thread in IMHO about how people take their tea. (I was just curious about the milk/cream thing, which prompted this thread.) 
I can’t tell you the exact yearthings changed, but our milk was delivered to our back door in glass bottles from 1948-62… The top few inches of the bottle were the shape of a head. The cream was in that portion of the bottle. Sitting on top of the milk. It was there if you wished to use it, or you could always shake the milk up and just drink it. That would have been through the 1950’s. I’m sure that by 1962 we weren’t getting it that way. Rather homogenized.
When I was a teenager, a lot of my friends, or at least their families raised cows, many of them milk cows. They never bought milk. Milk out of their fridge always had a couple inches of cream floating on top and what you got in the glass was what you got. It may have been all milk, it may have been milk with a couple floaters of cream. I never got used to that. I don’t like chunky milk. I have always preferred my coffee and tea straight up, but there is certainly a preference among many people between milk and cream. I couldn’t tell you the difference though in terms of beverages. Everything I read seems to tell me that cream goes in coffee and milk goes in tea. Why people dilute such great drinks is beyond me though.
In the UK, cows’ milk is available in eight categories – pasteurised (= full fat*), skimmed, semi-skimmed, homogenised, sterilised, Channel Island (= extra creamy), raw untreated and Kosher. If you buy your milk in glass bottles the category is identified by the colour of foil cap on the bottle.
Of those, I believe that semi-skimmed is the most popular and homogenised is way down the list. Many supermarkets only stock the first three in my list, but milk is still sometimes delivered to the door and we bought it that way when I was a kid. The unskimmed varieties do have a layer of cream if you allow them to stand, and I remember racing to get the first pouring from the bottle for my breakfast cereal to take advantage of that.
I take my tea with milk (I’ve got a mug in front of me now), and like Orwell I don’t recommend cream because the flavour is different and, to me, unpleasant. Tipping the bottle upside down is enough to mix the cream back into the milk.
*Full fat is also a nickname given to non-diet forms of fizzy drinks these days.
American boutique dairies still produce unhomogenized milk in glass bottles. There is nothing like that clot of cream stoppering the neck to bring back memories of unadorned and pure foods of old. I’m drinking some Mocha Java with pure heavy cream (sole ingredient: heavy cream) and sugar right now. If this mug held my favorite Irish breakfast tea, it would still have cream and sugar in it too.
Monty Python had a milkman sketch (or two). I saw them in the '80s and thought they were a little anachronistic because I’ve never actually seen a milkman.
My mom still gets non-homogenized milk from a Mennonite dairy farm. We used to skim off the cream and churn our own butter.
I think skim milk is nasty in tea. It’s much better with half-and-half, or whole milk in a pinch. Now I want a cup of tea, and I don’t even have any milk. 
ME
Could be worse. I’m doing the Atkins thing and I can’t have milk because of the carbohydrates in it. I have to use liquid Coffee Mate. And Splenda.
I do sympathise. Coffee Mate is bad enough in coffee; in tea you might as well use Tipp-Ex.
BTW, I’ve heard various stories about homogenised milk being unhealthy (the smaller fat molecules are taken into the blood too easily, the process allows dangerous enzimes to pass through etc. etc.). It’s hard to find a non-biased source online, so does anyone have the straight dope?
You can’t find non-biased sources because it is one of those things that respectable sources don’t even bother dealing with. It’s nonsense.
According to my wife, who’s on the same diet, you can’t have milk but you can have pure cream.
Gather round, kids. Let me tell you about milk that had the cream actually rising out of it to the top. And CDs that were made out of vinyl, we called them albums and you had to play them with a needle riding in grooves! And about phones with cords and dials… not buttons! And how we used to write letters by making markings on paper and using a government messenger service to physically deviler the mail. And when you got sick worse than a cold… you most likely died! And to heat up your food… which wasn’t prepared in advance… you used a box that produced heat…with fire!
Hmph… as a kid, the used to drill into me that Lincoln did his homework writing with coal on a shovel by the light of a chimney fire. Don’t they teach archaic lifestyles in school anymore? 
Correct. Full or Heavy Cream figures prominently in many Atkins Diet recipes. I’ve done it before with good feelings and excellent results.
Tomorrow in fact, I start it again in earnest. It has been a long haul indulging my carbo addiction.
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