The avid reader of this blog will be aware how much I appreciate easy recipes, and my attention was recently drawn to a very simple recipe for home-made ice-cream - no machine, no incessant churning, it's easy.

Armed with my home-made mincemeat I found a recipe for Christmas ice-cream and set about buying the requisite ingredients.

Let's see. Condensed milk - that's easy - and ... whipping cream.

Here we go again!

Over a decade ago when my eyes were keen and my beard dark I tried buying whipping cream here in France and discovered to my dismay that cream is a territorial species.

We Brits delight in half-cream, single-cream, whipping cream, double cream and clotted cream.

Americans, however, separated by a wide ocean and two-hundred years of cultural divergence, have their own classification, which includes "heavy cream".

Here in France I am still struggling to understand why some cr�me still tastes sour, and so is obviously cr�me fra�che, even though it doesn't say so on the pot.

Here is what I have discovered.

If you want whipping cream then you buy cr�me fleurette, which has added alginates to provide a frothing agent and help it whip. (shudders ... I can't, I just can't...)

Otherwise if you want to whip your cream you need to buy 30% cream.

To get non cr�me fra�che and have a cream that does not taste soured at all I only know of one brand, which comes in a kind of 33cl sachet.

Otherwise, since the ice-cream recipe contains sweetened condensed milk and I need 50cl of cream, I just frown, knuckle down and buy cr�me fra�che.

The holy grail of cream here is France is Cr�me d'Isigny, which is thick and unctuous and will play the role of clotted cream if you have good scones and are of a greedy and forgiving nature.

All clear?