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creamo
DCHP-2 (Oct 2016)
Spelling variants:Creamo
1n. — British Columbia and occasionally Alberta, Food & Drink
a blend of cream and milk with 10% fat content (see Image 1).
Type: 1. Origin — The term creamo is derived from a British Columbia dairy brand name (hence the capitalized variant Creamo). Creamo has been in use in BC since the early 1920s as a generic term for coffee cream, as the 1923 quotation from a UBC Yearbook and the 1920s advertisement in Image 2 show. In the latter, Creamo is presented without explanation, indicating that consumers were familiar with the term. Creamo was also the brand name of a breakfast cereal produced in post-WWI Alberta (see Image 3). Today, creamo competes with cream, coffee cream, half and half, and cereal cream among other terms, and shows some decline in use, though about 40 percent of Vancouverites still report using the term. Among the immigrant and working class population, creamo is used more frequently (see Dollinger 2012a). While the term is most popular in BC, it is much less frequently used than coffee cream today. Coffee cream is the preferred term in all Canadian provinces except Prince Edward Island, where table cream prevails, and Manitoba, where cereal cream is ahead by a slight margin (see Chart 2).
Quotations
1923
Dr. Marshall delivered an address on "Chromatic Emulsions." The subject was particularly interesting, perhaps because the average student knows so little about Colloidal Chemistry, but no doubt chiefly because the address was well illustrated with experiments and because of the references to such articles as butter and creamo.
1973
"Their machines brew instant
coffee and do it very quickly. The advantage over the vending machines is that it is made in pots and each pot is fresh brewed."
The coffee is sent from the
company in packets which include coffee, a filter, sugar and creamo, he said. There are 40 packets in a
kit and one packet makes 503 cups of coffee.
1993
The milk wagon -- a horse drawn cart -- came by the house daily and you could hear the clop-clop long before it arrived at your door. Mother would say, "go and get one bottle of milk and one of creamo" and I would run out. The milkman got down from the cart and took the milk out the back -- the horse only slowed but never stopped.
1994
The butter police had swept the place before we got there. So had the creamo patrol. But no one had checked the in-room mini-bar where a jar of cashews was waiting to seduce us.
My friend and I -- starved by a day too busy for lunch -- gobbled the cashews before heading down for our Westin Bayshore Spa Escape introductory dinner. Spa food, we figured, would be spartan. Better load up a bit first, right?
2002
A great deal of ingenuity goes into such work.
"We often end up using what other people throw out in our miniatures," says Shiells. "Corrugated cardboard makes for great house siding. Creamo containers become lampshades and acorn caps can be used for salad bowls."
2005
Jennifer Fedorink does with Creamo containers what Brian Jungen did with Air Jordans or Andy Warhol with Campbell Soup cans: makes them into something totally unexpected. Thousands of empty Creamo containers are bundled into bags, looking like nothing so much as hard-edged marshmallows. Other media Fedorink works with include recycled baking parchment and assemblages that suggest the anarchic hippie works of bill bissett or Al Neil.
2012
Frosting:
3 3/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp icing sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, melted and cooled
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled
1/4 cup milk
2 Tbsp light cream (Creamo) 1 tsp vanilla
References
- Dollinger (2012a)
Images
Image 1: Small container of Creamo by Dairyland. Photo: S. Dollinger
Image 2: Early ad in The Ubyssey, Feb. 23, 1926, p. 3. UBC Archives
Image 3: Creamo referring to a type of cereal. Edmonton Bulletin, 17 Feb. 1917, p. 15
Chart 1: Regional Domain Search, 21 Aug. 2012
