Tea parties - there's more than one kind
"With coffee you want to rush it. With tea you want to sit, you want the accompaniments, you want to enjoy the long-drawn-outness, the community, the sharing out of a pot, the rather childish, 'I'll halve my cake, if you halve yours'." Peter York
I gather it's very hot over there in England at the moment. Really hot. A few days ago though it wasn't quite as hot, and my sister hosted a tea party for two of her friends, in her beautiful garden in Sussex. It sounds like she went to a lot of effort. The menu went something like this - tuna salad finger sandwiches, mini spinach and cottage cheese frittatas, mini gooseberry and blue cheese pastries, mini cheese cakes, mini scones with homemade jam, and lime and coconut sponge cake. The drinks were tea of course, served in beautiful bone china from Japan, and some prosecco. All very traditional - except for the prosecco which is a modern touch. She tells me it was lovely and that she enjoyed doing it so much that really she would like to do it more - for a charity perhaps. And she should. Charity tea parties are quite a thing here I think, so she should look into it. I am not the only cook in the family as you can see - indeed it's in the genes I suspect on both sides of the family.
I was struck by the attention to all the trappings and how she had found it such an enjoyable thing to both prepare and to also take part in. And so very English. And when I looked into it a little I see that it's so English that it is a major tourist thing. Apparently if you want afternoon tea in one of London's more famous hotels you have to book weeks in advance even if you are a celebrity. It's one of the things that the Americans in particular love. Here in Melbourne - and indeed, throughout Australia - it is also a bit of a thing. Up in the Dandenongs it's all Devonshire teas, which are a bit of a specialist take on the afternoon tea, and actually somewhat simpler, and down here in Melbourne the two most famous are afternoon tea at the Windsor Hotel and or at the Hopetoun Tea Rooms in the beautiful Block Arcade. But there are plenty of others on offer too.
The Hotel Windsor is an elegant affair, the Hopetoun Tea Rooms not so much. More ladies of a certain age, or tourists having coffee and cake in rather overdone English style tea rooms. I have been here, and actually wasn't that impressed. You have to queue outside to get in, the service wasn't that great, the cakes were Ok but not superb and it was very crowded. But it is indeed popular. There is always a queue outside. It's an institution.
So how did it all begin and is afternoon tea the same as high tea? No it isn't. And even though high tea sounds posher, in fact it is more working class.
"Initially, it was a meal for the working man, taken standing up or sitting on tall stools, thus 'high'. Carrington Hotel Blue Mountains
The working man often didn't get time off for a proper meal at lunchtime you see, and so by the time he got home he was starving, so he was treated to pies and suchlike which he ate at the table - also higher than sitting in a chair and being served by the butler. We used to have high tea when we got home from school I remember. This usually consisted of bread and butter and something like baked beans on toast. I think that's right. Maybe my lovely sister will correct me. I think my grandmother used to offer shrimps at this time.
High tea is not a party though. It's a meal - one of the many in the English day. Afternoon tea on the other hand, as it developed became more of a party, although it did start out as a meal - specifically a meal to reduce the hunger pangs of the Duchess of Bedford in the 1840s, who found that it was too long between an early lunch and dinner at 8.00 to go without food. So she had some bread and butter (maybe the recently invented sandwiches), and cake and some tea brought to her room every afternoon around 4 or 5 o'clock. She soon began inviting friends and the fashion rapidly spread.
Initially it was not as elaborate as it later became. Mrs. Beeton, writing later in the 19th century decreed:
"Afternoon tea should be provided, fresh supplies, with thin bread-and-butter, fancy pastries, cakes, etc., being brought in as other guests arrive." Isabella Beeton
Mind you she doesn't really specify what those fresh supplies might be. In any event it rapidly became a proper party - albeit a party that may have happened on a daily basis. Both at home and in the newly flourishing tea rooms. For tea became cheaper and within the reach of just about everyone.
And it wasn't just for women. Men came too and if they didn't conform to the proper etiquette - holding the cup the wrong way for example - it could mean being crossed off the list as a suitable suitor.
Or children's birthday parties were sort of tea parties - including the tea - which I used to dread, because I didn't, still don't, like tea, but had to drink it out of politeness. And tea parties were such a delight and so special that small children used to play at tea parties - I'm sure they still do as one of their 'pretend' kind of games.
Tea parties after all are not just about the food. They are social occasions. A time to exchange gossip, to relax away from the toils of everyday life, and to just chill out. Although you would have to wonder if all the etiquette involved didn't put a bit of stress into the occasion for some.
When I was looking for pictures for tea parties, I found that most of them were of outdoor parties - even the fictional ones, such as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and Christopher Robin's birthday party for Pooh.
So when I found this quote I thought it was really quite apt.
"Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors." Alice Walker
Well the weather is not really up to outdoor tea parties as often in England as it is here. And there is something similar to a picnic in a tea party, but the picnic doesn't tend to have the bone china, or the silver service and the doilies does it?
Sometimes it's not even a party in the sense that people have been invited, it's just something that one does at a certain time in the day - most likely around 3 or 4 o'clock I think. A time out. Me time.
“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Henry James
And it doesn't have to be elaborate. And indeed these days, it often isn't - a cup of tea and a biscuit - or here in Australia - a vanilla slice.
I was going to digress into the Boston Tea Party and the current political faction called The Tea Party, but I won't. I am running out of time and besides those are both very depressing. Afternoon tea is a romantic and comforting thing. A wonderful thing indeed. I should start making scones and cup cakes and stop for a cup of tea - no coffee in my case - and a bite of something sweet in the afternoon. Or I should just invite all my friends around for a proper afternoon tea party. But I think I'll wait until the miserable weather has gone.
"In nothing more is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared than in the institution of this festival-almost one may call it-of afternoon tea...the mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose."
George Gissing
