Foreign News: Sour Cream

There was never a cow in all Normandy, or for that matter in all of France, that was so celebrated as Marie II. Dappled brown and white and the picture of contentment, Marie poured out milk so plentiful and creamy that she won blue ribbons by the score and, on one occasion, was bussed on both brown cheeks by President Coty of France. Cattle connoisseurs paid millions of francs for Marie's offspring, and Marie repaid their confidence. She broke the world record last year by producing a phenomenal 24,967 Ibs. in 330 days—enough for 1,658 Ibs. of butter.

Marie's glory was also glory for her milker. Kurt Kramer, onetime German P.W. who settled down after the war as a hired hand in the tiny Norman village of Ecardenville-la-Campagne. He attributed Marie's success to his secret feeding mixture of oats and hay, and to his own way with animals, which included addressing Marie as "Mein kleines Häslein" (my little rabbit) whenever he milked her.

But in the proud dairy country of Normandy, there were other dairymen, jealous perhaps, who cast a suspicious eye on Kramer's skill and Marie's prowess. They studied his methods carefully. One day last week they sent four village gendarmes to surround Marie's pasture. As Kurt started milking, the gendarmes burst from the bushes and shouted. "Hands up!" They had caught him in the act.

Under Kramer's apron they found a rubber hot-water bottle filled with preheated cream. A long, thin tube led from the bottle through the hay at Marie's feet and into the milking pail. By pressing the bottle with his forearms as he leaned forward to strip Marie, the milker could send squirts of cream into his milking pail. With this evidence in hand, the gendarmes bustled Kramer off to jail on the charge of fraud, and the dairymen of Normandy, with the solemnity demanded of the occasion, took steps to drop the name and claim to fame of Marie the famous milker from the Normandy herd book.