Mrs. Teabody Talks Tea at PA Tea Festival
*Caveat: the following provides the information from a lecture on British Tea Style presented at the Pennsylvania Tea Festival on September 27, 2019.
Just a few months from now, Mr. Teabody and I will embark on yet another, much-anticipated holiday in England -- Yorkshire this time. Imagine that! After so many trips abroad, I am still THRILLED to be going to England! Next to my very own home in rural Pennsylvania, England/Great Britain/the United Kingdom is my very favorite place to be. Perhaps it is yours as well?
How did this now decades-long love affair begin and how did my Anglophilia bring me to where I am today: owning my own tea shop, playing a role in my community's social and business scenes, giving teas for charities and being part of a tea association? How did a person who grew up on a farm become such a fan of all things British? It was a gradual process.
Let's be clear: I am no less an American because I love England so much. After all, I've spent my entire life living in, working in, teaching in, paying taxes in and owning a business in the good old USA. So get that twist out of your knickers right now because you can love your own country and still be a certified ANGLOPHILE.
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| Anglophile
But how does one become an Anglophile? As a Baby Boomer, I was the willing prime target of the allure of television and magazines. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, my world seemed very small but the leaders in elementary school were quick to share major events of the world with us when possible on television and through news reels, and there was something unmistakably electrifying about being herded into a large assembly room with dozens of other children to view a fuzzy but nonetheless thrilling event taking place in the country of our friendly allies 2500 miles east: the coronation of a QUEEN. A YOUNG queen at that.
The pageantry, the processional, the plume-headed guards in beautiful formation, the elegant dress and at the heart of it all riding in a Cinderella coach was Elizabeth the Queen.  |
I was impressed. Enchanted. I wanted more of whatever was going on in England. Getting any kind of contact with England was pretty hard to achieve. Thanks be to Heaven for magazines.
Magazines, television and radio were the internet of the 60s. Style-conscious teenagers and adults were picking up magazines in drugstores to admire covers and magazine editors knew exactly how to tantalize us. One of the very first models to become internationally famous was The Shrimp, Jean Shrimpton--as ethereal and lovely as anyone could aspire to be.
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| The Shrimp And if she didn't trip your trigger style-wise, how about another little tiny speck of a girl with skirts up to here and eyes the size of saucers? Yes, indeed, none other than Twiggy. Needless to say, here was style so different from what we saw all around us--we in our Villager dresses and penny loafers-- that we could not help but be drawn into her appeal. |
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| Demure Villager dresses |
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| Much more leg |
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| Twiggy |
Even with all these memorable and potent images of royalty and fashion trends, perhaps the greatest influence--the one that bonded the world to this tiny country so far away was a group of four young men the likes of which we had never before seen. They were unique in appearance with their glorious skinny suits and unusual haircuts but added to their stylish image was their infectious sound. Yes, we are talking about the Fab Four.
"Oh, yeah, I'll tell you something; I think you'll understand. . ."
With their appearance in January of 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, George, Paul, John and Ringo became household names
Right in front of our very eyes were these moppy-haired young men singing with the perfect mixture of heart and cheek that made you sit up and take notice of British style? I noticed.
Please do not tell me you were resistant to their charm?
The Beatles and their music as well as the music of many other British groups that followed would continue to have an impact on American taste for decades, aka The British Invasion. In fact the Rolling Stones just played to sell-out crowds in Philly two months ago.
Along with my appreciation and affection for Royalty, fashion and music, I was the bookie type, and I don't mean a person who takes bets. I loved BOOKS of all sorts. Perhaps for you a book or play by a British writer sealed a relationship with all that Britain represents. Perhaps it is the novel that begins "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"? - - all rocky coast and plotting Danvers?
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited."
Perhaps it is the play that begins, "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention"?--all waddle and daub buildings, ink pots, men in tights?
O for a muse of fire
And what would life be without the works of Dame Agatha Christie and my particular favorite character, Miss Marple?
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| "Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner . . . "- The Murder at the Vicarage |
Perhaps you think of seeing rabbits popping out of a Brambly hedge
or a dear little boy hand-in-hand with a "bear of little brain."
Perhaps it is the hand-scrawled manuscripts of Jane Austen
Or even the thrilling tales by Ian Fleming, creator of the world's most well-known secret agent where the world's most terrifying situations would only "stir" him, not "shake" him
If you are at all like Mrs. Teabody, and I suspect you ARE, there is a strong possibility that you also love the queens of contemporary detective fiction and have a strong affection for Dame P.D. James and her inimitable Adam Dalgleish or Dame Ruth Rendell and her memorable Inspector Reginald Wexford.
Perhaps you have deep regard for American writers who write as though they LIVE in England -- writers like Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George. In fact I love Martha Grimes so much that I had to visit Lamorna Wink, an experience worth your while should you find yourself in Cornwall.
And to polish off this literature-based exploration into British Style, I would be remiss in not mentioning the ENABLERS-- those streaming television networks such as Acorn, BritBox, Masterpiece Theatre that feed us Poldark
along with films about every possible segment of English royal history and a thirty-year love affair with Inspector Morse, a character created by writer Colin Dexter. Vera, Shetland, Grantchester, Doc Martin? Must I go on? Oh, just one more:
Possibly another?
If everything I have mentioned thus far is outside your experience, perhaps I can stir a memory with this very old but bouncy little invitation to take a trip to England. It's from a popular 60's singer, Roger Miller:
England Swings
"Now, if you huff and puff and you finally save enough
Money you can take your family on a trip across the sea
Take a tip before you take your trip, let me tell you where to go
Go to Eng-e-land, oh
England swings like a pendulum do
Bobbies on bicycles, two by two
Westminster Abbey, the tower of Big Ben
The rosy-red cheeks of the little children"
By now you should be completely persuaded to enjoy British style first hand, but here comes the tricky bit. We have explored how we got this way, we Anglophiles full of appreciation for English style--so inventive, so intelligent, so amusing but how do we make a face-to-face connection with this CULTURE we so admire?
My chance to witness it all first hand would come through my appreciation for Mr. William Shakespeare.
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| Mr. Teabody and I are pictured in front of his birthplace on Henley Street. |
In 1989 I would make my very first transatlantic crossing in a British Airways 747 seated in aisle seat 21C. The National Endowment for the Humanities offered a Summer Seminar for teachers called Shakespeare: Text and Theatre. Hundreds of teachers across America competed to win a spot in the seminar and somehow I was one of the lucky 15 chosen. That six weeks in England proved life changing in so many ways, and one of them was developing an appreciation for and a love of TEA. But I get ahead of myself.
I arrived at London's Heathrow Airport at 6:35 A.M. and my feet barely touched the ground as I handed over my very first passport to my very first immigration officer and watched him stamp my arrival information inside. Somehow I found my way through the rest of the maze, located and hefted my two large cases onto a SmartCart and walked into the arrivals hall at Heathrow Airport for the first time. Thrilling. Dozens of people pushed against the crowd control ropes. Some of them carried flowers, some carried balloons. Many held signs with a single name upon it though none with mine. Every face bore the same look of expectation. It still happens every time.
Almost every Anglophile has watched the film, Love Actually which begins with a scene in an emotion-packed arrivals hall at London's Heathrow Airport. Hugh Grant’s character as the prime minister voices a lovely introduction to the overlapping stories in the film:
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends."--Love Actually
No one was meeting me however. I had a plan in place. I was to kill time until 9:00 A.M. England time when I would follow signs to ground transportation to catch a FlightLink "coach" to Stratford-upon-Avon where I was to spend the next 43 days of my life. I went to Thomas Cook and cashed my very first American Express pounds sterling travelers check asking for some coins along with my bills, please. Looking through the small batch of British legal tender I could not help but notice my favorite queen's face adorning the bills and, what? Robert Burns? Robert Louis Stevenson? Had I died and gone to heaven? Writers on currency?
Money tucked inside my fanny pack, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in way of celebration of being in England. I would have a cup of tea. I spotted a cafe where I saw folks eating breakfast. I stood in my first "queue" with my tray and ordered tea. Cream? Yes. Sugar? Oh, my, yes. I waited in great anticipation for my proper teapot, my proper and lovely flowery china teacup and saucer and almost fainted when I was handed a styrofoam cup with a Pepsi Cola logo on the side and a teabag languishing in the not-so-very-hot water inside. It was to be my first and almost only disappointment of the trip.
I might have dozed at some point during the nearly five-hour bus ride to the Little Chef at Warwick along the "A", but I doubt it. I was too excited. I climbed down from the coach and the driver dug my two cases from the bowels of the bus, and suddenly standing by my side was a lovely girl with thick curly hair and a huge smile on her face.
"Hello," she said and each vowel was like a bell. "You must be Lin. I'm Jenny Whybrow." I can still hear the music in her voice. Jenny was the first person I met on English soil and we remain friends to this day. Here we are on a trip to Bath, England.
Over the years Jenny has reminded me of that first meeting saying I must have asked at least one hundred questions during the fifteen minute ride to Ambleside Guest House in Stratford Upon Avon. Jenny helped me lug my cases to the door which was almost blocked by two massive hanging baskets of flowers. I rang the bell and in just another moment I was looking at the second person I would meet in England who was to be my landlady, hostess, second mother and extra sister during my stay. Here is the wonderful woman who wore so many hats in helping me keep my sanity, Mrs. Pamela Barnacle. We are together at Hidcote and this was a VERY happy day.
Here you see the exterior of and the dining room of Ambleside Guest House which during Pamela Barnacle's stewardship was one of the most popular in town. Each morning we'd arrive in the breakfast room to find it ready for us to sit down. My roommate and I nearly always took the seat in the window looking out on Grove Road and we would always order coffee which was just uniformly horrible.
"This is instant coffee," my friend would say wrinkling up her nose and making a horrible face. We never had a decent cup of coffee during our entire stay but we came to terms with it all by drinking cappuccino which had enough milk in it to soften the blow.
One day I was sitting alone in the dining room feeling terribly homesick. Pam came in, noted my face and said, "Lin, you need a cuppa and I'm going to fix it for you. Follow me." I had never been inside Pam's living quarters before and I'd never had anyone make me a cup of tea using loose tea. It took an eternity to fill the electric kettle with fresh water, heat the ceramic teapot, empty it after the water boiled and then add 6 teaspoons of loose fragrant tea to the warm teapot. Then she poured the boiling water over the tea leaves and stuck the whole shebang inside a warmer she would call a cozy. While we waited, she collected the summer chintz teacups and saucers we used in the breakfast room along with teaspoons, paper serviettes, a bowl of demerara sugar, a little pitcher of milk and placed them on the low table in front of the sofa where I sat. Last she collected a packet of digestives and put a stack on a plate. "Put some milk in your cup," she ordered. "Two spoons of sugar. This is a two lump mood unless I miss my guess." And then she poured my first cuppa. "Give it a moment as it's hot," she warned. We waited quietly. The moment arrived. And sitting there 2500 miles away from home in the lounge of a woman a barely knew, I drank my first authentic cuppa and knew the power of the phrase I have heard so many times:
"Where would we be without our tea?"
During my remaining weeks in England I would drink dozens more cups of tea as I adjusted to my new life, but it was the power of that first experience that made me bring the custom home and made me want to share it with those who NEED tea and those who just love it.
"Tea" has at least a handful of meanings in England. Cream tea is a pot of tea with a scone and clotted cream and jam. Elevenses is a midmorning tea break. But typically when we speak of tea we expect a tiered stand of scones, sandwiches and sweets. This is called
Traditional afternoon tea
"Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford was a good friend to Queen Victoria. According to the accepted legend, the duchess — and her hunger pangs — created the afternoon tea tradition. Back then, lunch for the upper crust was generally a light repast served at noon, and dinner among the fashionable and idle occurred no earlier than 7:30 P.M. Legend tells us that during one long, food-less afternoon, the duchess felt hunger pangs and ordered tea and snacks brought to her bedroom chamber. The refreshments did the trick, and the Duchess soon made this tea break a habit" - -as if one needs an excuse for a snack.
"The duchess' well-heeled friends began joining her in this post-lunch tea ritual," the story goes, "and the practice spread in aristocratic circles. Though some historical references call this ritual 'low tea' — because the ladies would sit in low armchairs while sipping — afternoon tea was hardly a humble affair then. Nor is it today."
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| Tiered tray at Baccarat |
The above photograph is what we have come to expect to be served at fine hotels in London such as Brown's, The Ritz, and Langham's or a legendary food hall such as Fortnum and Mason usually in the afternoon and including crustless, filled sandwiches-- the Fab Five, scones and toasted tea cakes or crumpets along with a sweets course: tartlets, bombes, eclairs-- always at least three courses but sometimes all served on one tiered stand, other times brought as separate courses. According to A Social History of Tea, Traditional Afternoon tea is generally served around 3 or 4 p.m. these days. "Regardless of when and where you have afternoon tea, it's a time to mind your manners. Place your napkin on your lap and stir gently. Splashing tea, clinking cups and spoons and finger licking will make you appear beastly.
And definitely don't devour everything in front of you. You don't actually want to appear hungry at this meal — propriety calls for restraint."
So what is HIGH TEA then?
Spend anytime more than fifty miles outside of London and when you hear someone ask, "What's for tea? or Where's me tea?" he or she may simply be asking the equivalent of "What's for dinner?" After a long working day, folks arrive home tired and hungry and while the Duchess may be taking her afternoon tea to starve off hunger pains until the dinner hour, a tired man or woman may actually be using the term a bit sarcastically. And that's where the term "high tea" entered the lexicon of tea talk because it was taken at a higher table than that of the salon and some even say that the "high" is referring to the high-backed chairs used for most meals in a normal household a hundred years ago. In the United States, we equate the term "high tea" to the trend of serving at least one hot dish along with the traditional afternoon tea fare. In some tea rooms, this is a soup while other tea rooms serve somewhat heartier fare. In this regard, the American version has wielded some influence. One of the poshest hotels in London, Langham's, offers "High Tea" on their menu and it is generally a hot omelette or a piece of broiled fish. And it is now that I refer to a rather assertive argument from a lifelong Brit and travel advisor that you can use the next time anyone says that there is no such thing as "high tea" in England:
"One of two of the impish locals here (I'm being kind) clearly know, and have always known what American visitors want when they say high tea. . .
Call up any hotel in London and ask for a high tea reservation and I guarantee you'll soon be eating cakes and sandwiches, you'll get no lesson on terminology, and I'll put my mortgage on your never being mistakenly served this ham eggs and chips myth."
I hope the combination of Langham's serving "High Tea" and this very good explanation puts the argument to rest. The point of taking tea is to enjoy it. The common element running through all this terminology war is tea; the common experience running through all is taking the time to sit down long enough to refresh yourself and set this often-too-hectic world back to rights.
Finally, many, many folks sit down in their homes at four o'clock to a nice cuppa and a biscuit (cookie) just as a little pick-me-up or a bit to tide them over until dinner. The very last type -- a nice cuppa and a biscuit - - is what one can always be assured of at Tickle Your Fancy. This week is our birthday and I guarantee you will be happy with our offerings.
If you ever do follow your Anglophilia to London, here are some tried and true venues for traditional and slightly non-traditional Afternoon Tea.
Fortnum & Mason
181 Piccadilly (Est 1707) Westminster 44 20 7734 8040
Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon Level 4
http:www.fortnumandmason.com
Traditional Afternoon tea £55 per person
Can purchase a voucher for two for Champagne afternoon tea for £109
Fab Five sandwiches: smoked salmon, Coronation chicken, cucumber, ham/beef, egg mayonnaise
Scones with jam, curd and clotted cream
Sweets plus choice of Victoria Sponge, chocolate or banana loaf
The Ritz
150 Piccadilly Westminster 44 (0) 207 493 8181
http:www.theritzlondon.com
Traditional afternoon tea £58. With Champagne £77
Special rate of £49.30 if booking Mon-Thursday at 11:30 A.M. or 7:30 P.M
Fab Five: Ham, Cheddar and Chutney, Cucumber Cream, Coro chix, smoked salmon
Scones, raisin and plain, cream and strawberry jam
Brown's Hotel
Albemarle Street Mayfair 44 20 74936020
roccofortehotels.com
Traditional Afternoon tea £55 per person with champagne £68
Fab Five sandwiches on unique breads and buns
Scones plain and with sultanas with jam, curd and clotted cream
Sweets plus choice of Victoria Sponge, macaroons, eclairs
The Langham
1 C Portland Place, Marylebone 44 20 7636 1000
langhamhotels.com
Traditional Afternoon tea with Wedgwood £62 per person with champers £83
Seasonal sandwiches, scones and jams, changing every two weeks
Also offers “High Tea” which includes a hot dish such as eggs or broiled salmon£68
Sweets from an ever-changing selection
The B Bakery Tea Tour
Victoria Coach Station 020 3026 1188
164 Buckingham Palace Road
or 8 Northumberland Avenue off Trafalgar Square
Daily 12:00, 14:30, 17:00
london.b-bakery.com
email info@b-bakery.com
Afternoon tea with a short London highlights
tour on a red double decker bus
traditional afternoon tea £65 and up
All venues offer all the components of traditional afternoon tea with sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, and a selection of sweets. All offer vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options. All expect or require reservations—easy to do online or by phone. All offer some sort of live music, mostly piano and/or harp, sometimes jazz combos. Check ahead with your venue if this is important to you. All but the bus tour expect you to be dressed appropriately meaning no shorts, sneakers and/or backpacks. Prices listed are before taxes or gratuities. If you are not certain if the venue adds these fees, ask at booking. I hope you do make the trip, and I hope you will take the time to enjoy a proper cuppa---and not in a styrofoam Pepsi cup.
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