Light cream

Light cream — also sold as coffee cream, table cream or, in Britain, single cream — is the pourable middle grade of cream, standardised to roughly 18–30% milkfat. Richer and rounder than half-and-half yet far thinner than heavy cream, it is the everyday enriching cream: a splash that softens coffee, a swirl that rounds a soup, a pour that turns a pan sauce silky. Its defining limitation is the flip side of that lightness — it carries too little fat to whip into stable peaks, and it curdles more readily than heavy cream if boiled hard.