The thunder crashed
The lightening flashed
And all the world was shaken;
The little pig
Curled up his tail
And ran to save his bacon

^-Anon

Last month on National Cream Tea Day we investigated the best way of eating scones, with accompaniments strawberry jam (with Alpine strawberries if you happen to be in the Intercontinental Hotel) and clotted cream being both overall favourite as well as traditional. But there are other things you can do with clotted cream. A very typical use is to eat it on bread (or a Cornish ‘split’, a slightly sweet white bread roll) with black treacle (or honey or golden syrup); a hardly-slimming confection fondly referred to as thunder and lightning. The black treacle represented the thunder and the clotted cream the lightning. Now however the description can apply to any mixture of thick cream (or ice cream) and sugar (in the form of syrup or even honeycomb) on the other.

Hence thunder and lightning ice cream is a mix of vanilla ice cream and honeycomb. Serve with hot apple melded with calvados and lemon shortbread.

However, there are some other meanings, as I discovered when I happened (as I often do) onto The Old Foodie blog. Of these my favourite is ‘brandy sauce ignited’ – wonderful – but apparently it can also mean: gin and bitters; a sugar, citrus and whisky drink; or (in the southeastern US) a pickled salad of cucumbers and onions.

Enjoy listening to Strauss’s ‘between thunder and lightning polka’ and Holst’s Jupiter (god of jollity and thunder), and The Divertissement Chamber Orchestra playing Vivaldi’s The Storm, while you mull this over.