cream [ME] Although borrowed from Old French cresme (modern crème), cream has a mixed ancestry before being formed from ecclesiastical Latin chrism [OE], which comes from Greek chrisma ‘anointing’ and late Latin camum, which may be a Gaulish word for cream. Medieval English cookbooks have many recipes for cooking with cream, including a recipe for custard [LME], originally a word for anything cooked in a pastry crust [ME], from Latin crusta ‘hard surface, rind, shell’. Cream came to mean the best part of something in the late 16th century (but the French crème de la crème not before the mid 19th century), in much the same process as *flower came to mean the best. See also ice.