An English Farmhouse Tea
I’m not given to nostalgia. But once in a while I want some faint taste of the foods of my youth. And in my family, tea was the best of all meals. Tea came at the end of the work day, except during the long, hard days of harvesting, Tea came at the end of the school day. Tea was for conversation and for entertaining.
Now it’s as dead as the dodo. No one in England has tea anymore. It was a meal with a brief history, perhaps a hundred or a couple of hundred years at most. It does not fit the modern workday.
And tea is not just one thing. There were afternoon teas and high teas (which are low class in general). There were tennis teas and picnic teas and teas after a hard day in the saddle hunting. There were birthday teas and Christmas teas. And each, in its time, had its own rules and regulations. You broke these rules at your peril in class-conscious Britain.
Whatever the form though tea was a symphony arranged around the theme of newly available and highly valued white flour. Variations were provided by butter and eggs and sugar. The result was an astonishing set of variations on this rather small numbers of ingredients.
Its flavorings in the savory dishes were luxury vegetables, meats, eggs, fish, but rarely cheese. In the sweet dishes, the products of the British Empire: dried fruits and nuts; crystallized and dry ginger; sweet spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves; lemons and oranges; coffee. But the flavors that dominate cakes in the United States today–chocolate and vanilla–were largely absent.
And like any meal so rooted in time and place and class, it’s not that easy to reproduce.
On my mother’s side of the family, the main meal of the day is always called “Tea”. In fact I tend to ask “What’s for Tea?”, rather then dinner etc. While Tea was the main meal, we also sometimes had afternoon tea, which was usually scones and fruit cake and tea.
A pet annoyance of mine is when people say “High Tea”, when they mean something like a Cream Tea.
Many of the Tea cakes etc were adapted from the range of cakes etc that were drank with sherry, port, madeira etc. O
I think we should start a new campaign to bring back “tea” – but which one, the low class high tea or the high class low tea?
That makes me sad.
I love tea time…whatever “type” you want to call it, but I like it best sitting by my woodstove with tiny bites of sweets….or sandwiches..or…..
And why is the tradition lost, Rachel? Why doesn’t it fit in the modern day?
Hi Rachel, You are so right, so much is lost to the Coka Cola and 100 other sugar solutions.
Of course iced tea was the flavor of the day at our house. I loved it, but to be honest we did not drink tea, coke or any other beverage as much as we did milk and water or perhaps lemonade and orange juice.
As for cakes, vanilla was predominant and lemon etc, but not nearly the chocolate. I expect part of this is out of expediancy in the States, as tea and other things seem to just take too much time, or that is the impression.
I think we all need to slow down and recapture what we lost in so many things. Thanks for your insightful thoughts and advice too.
Always,
Phil
Adam, your comment that the main meal of the day was called tea in your mother’s family just drives home how important it was. But was it meat and two veg and tea? I’d be curious to know.
Yes, Janet, I’m with you. Bring back tea. But it really is out of sync with modern eating habits–carbs, fats and sugar.
And Senora, Mihaela and Phil, in response to the question of its disappearance. I think this is because in England most people now eat the main meal on getting home from work, say at 7 or so. In the past they lived close enough to work to eat the main meal at home at midday. Now they have a sandwich at midday and don’t want a big tea to spoil their appetite for dinner or supper or whatever they call the last meal of the day.
Yep, meat and veg. It was quite usual to have tea at every meal. But this is quite common. If you do a simple search of the phrase “What’s for Tea?”, you get all sorts of lunch/dinner items. The OED gives the following definition of “Tea”
“4. a. A meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; esp. an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea (but sometimes cocoa, chocolate, coffee, or other substitute). Now usu. a light meal in the late afternoon, but locally in the U.K. (esp. northern), and in Australia and N.Z., a cooked evening meal; in Jamaica, the first meal of the day.”
Wiltshire isn’t in the North is it.
I’ve always been confused because up north (in England) they refer to what we southerners call “dinner”(ie the evening meal) as “tea”…”what’s for tea, pet?”…… and what we southerners call “lunch” they call “dinner”…though school dinners seem to transcend the north/south divide and are always at midday. Mind you an alternative to a school dinner is a packed lunch (not a packed dinner)
My gosh, Adam, you’re right. Wiltshire is in the south. No seriously, tea has lots of different meanings in different places. But the farmhouse tea that I grew up with, the last major meal of the day at 5 pm but definitely not a high tea, has gone completely.
Paul, you are right, the terminology shifts all the time. See quick post.
Speaking of high tea and class…
In America high tea is often thought of as “upper class”.
I was watching a television show the other day. The matriarch of an “old money” American family prided herself on her knowledge of the fineries of European upper class dishes (French and British). In one scene she admonished her daughter-in-law and granddaughter for fighting during high tea…
Adam, like Ji-Young I wonder if this shift is happening in Britain? My exposure to non-family British is pretty limited. The nineteenth-century quotation is interesting because they really are referring to a high tea. I would like to hold out for an intermediate tea between “afternoon” and “high”. What we ate was not high tea in the sense that although there were savory dishes there was not free-standing meat. And it was not afternoon tea which we clearly distinguished because unlike our farmhouse tea it was not substantial enough to be a full meal. That was what we had after an afternoon concert or cricket match or the like.
I think that at the moment there is a shift in the meaning of “High Tea”. Essentially this working class meal, has become the name of bourgeoisie afternoon/cream tea.
Is this shift in meaning happening in Great Britain as well? Or Australia?
I am pretty sure, if childhood memories serve me well, that in America “high tea” has been mistaken for “upper class” afternoon tea for quite some time.
I would imagine that it goes back to well before your childhood. There are plenty of references to “High Tea” in an upper class context. I wonder if originally these definitions were not then as strict as they became in the 20th century (which have again relaxed).
From the 19th century:
“Now, the reasons which made a movable high tea more economical than a fixed dinner are as inscrutable to me as the reasons for which the meal was called tea at all. There was never the most shadowy pretence at tea to be seen upon the table—what fashionable ladies could keep up the strength their hard life demands on such mild fluid? and mayonnaises, cold game and poultry, and raised pies, are not, in the country at least, cheaper than hot dishes. That high tea, with three young and charming women, open windows, no servants, and no master of the house, was a much pleasanter meal than a hot dinner in a hot room, with a hot butler, and a hot old general eating audibly, was incontestable; and Mr. Clarendon Whyte, and all other bachelor frequenters of the house, were loud in praise of the change, and strenuous in advocating it among disaffected young wives and revolutionary daughters elsewhere.”
My own introduction to “Tea” as a meal, rather than as simply a beverage, was on a trip in my teens to Victoria, BC, Canada. The tradition is still very much in evidence and looks like what this column would call a Cream Tea.
http://www.fairmont.com/empress/GuestServices/Restaurants/AfternoonTea.htm
Americans, I am one so can freely criticize!, have decided High Tea is high class and that Big Ben is the Elisabeth Tower. There are so many examples of tourists miss naming, miss understanding, miss pronouncing but prevailing! The Brits have stopped fighting it when it comes to High Tea snd Big Ben. I am sure there is a book in there somewhere to be written with the changes tourists have done to the locals…. No matter which local or which tourist
Yes, definitely. A whole book could be written on how tourists have transformed local cultures. In fact, I am sure there is one but I just don’t know the name.