In most parts of the English-speaking world, food purity laws mandate that all things sold as ‘cream’ have to begin their journeys to our réfrigérateurs in the interior of a cow. Because of this, when looking for a word to describe the squishy, sticky, synthetic stuff that provided shelf-stable cookies and cakes with their creamy centers, the honchos of Hostess and the nabobs of Nabisco settled on ‘creme’.
However, in those corners of the Anglosphere where people eschew Pop Tarts in favor of ‘all-organic, mostly locally sourced, baked from scratch hand pies’, ‘creme’ has a different meaning. In keeping with the rule that ‘recently imported French words are classier than those that crossed the Channel in Chaucer’s time’, gastronomes use it to describe especially fancy forms of the bovine goodness that, in days of yore, would reliably rise to the top of milk bottles.
When using ‘crème’ in this way, those who are au courant of the germane conventions do two things. Firstly, they provide the ‘e’ in ‘crème’ with a suitable topping, the little mark that the French call the accent grave. Secondly, they pronounce the word in a way that rhymes with ‘gem’.
Thus we have crème fraiche (sour cream’s creamier cousin), crème brulée (which is tastier than ‘burnt cream’ would suggest), crème anglaise (the creamy sauce Britons call ‘custard’), and, of course, the crème de la crème (which is, as Thurston Howell III used to say, is ‘absolutely top drawer’.)
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The gas station coffee machine had a notice about Creme. It was the foam on top of the cup after the electric barista finished pouring. But I'm in Ohio so....
Thurston Howell III? Next you will be referring to three hour tours.