English Tea
Here’s my December tea for a dozen friends. The table is stretched to the limit and the chairs are an odd mixture.
Here are the savories. Clockwise from bottom left. Home made walnut bread and butter with fresh cucumbers, peppers and celery. And–imagine this–Brazilian cheese rolls of cassava instead of cheese scones which I was a bit leary about making fresh at the last minute at 7000 feet. Egg and cress in homemade bridge rolls (small elongated rolls). Open faced ham sandwiches on homemade white bread.
And here are the sweet dishes. Left clockwise. Raspberry and lemon curd tarts, malt bread and butter, (more of the egg and cress), and coffee meringues filled with whipped cream.
And white fruit cake topped with almonds and butter cake (should have been a sponge but again I feared for the altitude) with white chocolate icing.
All with a choice of black teas with milk or lemon, limonada, followed by, you guessed it, sherry.
Do you have any idea how noisy a dozen women can be?
Bloody hell that look like a lot of work has been put into it. What type of sherry do the ladies drink?
It sounds like a terrific tea party….I can almost feel the smell of cakes tickling my nose!
And your coffee meringues look so delicate!
Mariana and Adam,
It was a great party. Tea is great for entertaining. You may be amused to know that I could not avoid giving my friends a little lecture on the history of tea as a meal. They were very patient.
And Adam, work, yes, but how else do I get an occasional taste of my past. And the cake tin (meringues, fruit cake) and the freezer (breads of various kinds) are the answer.
And the ladies (this was an expatriate event, not my Mexican friends, though I have done teas for them too) did not like sherry, neither the Tio Pepe Palomino Fino nor the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. They moved smartly to the wine bottles. And that just after I had read in some prestigious food journal that sherry was the new in drink.
But it does raise two question? Kaori O’Connor offers the English breakfast as the archetypal English meal, at least as viewed by foreigners. But when I travel, it’s always the English tea that they want. YOur vote?
And what about this? In the late nineteenth century most upper class in most countries developed either two parallel kitchens or different kinds of meals for different times of day or both. One was for French Cuisine to show they were modern. The other was for their own cuisine because they liked it.