Headmaster’s Thoughts: April 2023
There are tea ceremonies all over the world, but nothing quite like the English tea ceremony. Since it may become a fading institution, I want to give it a review before it goes away with the steam locomotive. You can find this odd ceremony practiced in the better English hotels and a few department stores in London.
You start with tea, of course. Not bundled tea in a neat bag…oh no! Much too clean! You have loose dusty tea in the bottom of a teapot made out of what is optimistically called “hotel silver”. Translated, “hotel silver” means shiny silver-like metal. Boiling water is then poured onto that loose tea. The pot, including the metal handle of the same “hotel silver”, gets very hot from the boiling water, and you burn your fingers picking it up. But, pick it up you do, and pour the tea into a cup where first you have a small quantity of milk. It is against the religious nature of this production to pour the milk afterwards. If you request lemon, you may be asked to leave the establishment. For no apparent reason, you will also be served a smaller similar pot containing boiling water. No one really understands why except that it is another opportunity to burn your fingers. The tea is poured through a portable strainer (often made of the same silver-like metal) which can catch the dusty leaves and also allow (some say deliberately cause) the boiling liquid to run off the strainer on to the saucer and, possibly, the tablecloth. Why the strainer is not built into the pot I do not know, but the running of the hot water all over the place because of the portable nature of the strainer, and the mess that you create in removing the dripping strainer, is clearly part of the ceremony. Then you put in sugar, stir, and drink (when it is still too hot). And, if you do the ceremony right, you look smug and say words to the effect that it is infinitely better than tea made with a tea bag. You have burnt fingers, there is brown fluid all over the table, and a Keurig pod would produce exactly the same taste, except that a Keurig does not have this ceremonial quality.
With the tea comes cold toast, with hard, frozen, butter in a separate dish. The toast was not made fresh, but somewhere in the back kitchen, and it will be produced, standing vertically, in an old-looking toast rack. A toast rack is something sold in an antique store that no-one in their right mind would buy. I quite like toast that is hot, or even warm. Not cold, thank you very much. A toast rack will ensure that all warmth leaves the burnt bread quickly and efficiently. The toast is ceremonially displayed, with each slice standing separate and aloof from the others, to improve heat loss.
What you get next depends on how much you are paying for this feast. If promised a “Devon Cream Tea”, you will get rather mealy scones with a dish of clotted cream and strawberry jam. There are columns written in English newspapers on whether the jam goes first on the scone or the cream. As if it made any difference whatsoever. All I can say, with certainty, is that clotted cream is called clotted because that is what it does to your arteries.
The alternative to the scone and clotted cream tea, is the sandwich tea. Here you will get slices of white bread, with the crusts carefully removed (after all, they are the most nutritional part of the bread), and thin slices of cucumber will be placed carefully between the two slices. When I say thin, I am not doing justice to the skill of the slicer who, in a previous life, might have sliced smoked salmon at Zabar’s. On the assumption that cucumbers are more valuable than white truffles, the slices are so thin that they are transparent. There may also be Marmite sandwiches. I may have lost you at this point. Marmite is a yeast extract that tastes like…well it is indescribably bad! Imagine something both over-spicy and depressingly pungent; no, I cannot do it justice. If they gave it to prisoners, the prison guards would receive notice from the International Court of Justice at the Hague that they have committed war crimes.
To be fair, you may also get cheese in those white bread slices without crusts. The cheese will be tasteless. The same can be said for the ham that will look like ham but, for any American, will taste unlike any ham they have had before. If you are lucky, you may get a thin layer of scrambled eggs in your sandwiches. If unlucky, you will get fish paste. Some of you may have a delicate disposition, so I will not even discuss what goes into fish paste or what it tastes like. You would never read an essay by me again.
Finally, for this ceremony to be done correctly, you should be served pastries. English pastries are unique. They have a doughy quality, and they are covered with pink icing. In short, they are ghastly. But they are served, as the sandwiches sometimes are, in a pyramid tower. Unfortunately, the vertical effect does not impact the taste.
To join this ceremony, you will have to wait to get a table to sit down with the other tourists who want to participate. If there are any English people there, and that is unlikely, they will be ladies looking for a place to sit and gossip.
The only positive is that that you will be served by ladies in ridiculous costumes, dating from the early Nineteenth Century, that were worn by parlor maids. They speak in an interesting dialect that is known as “Cockney London”. You may be called “Ducks”, which can be surprising, or “Dearie”, or “Luv”. And, in return, you get to call the waitress “Miss”, regardless of her age or marriage situation. If a man is serving tea, he will speak with a foreign accent.
Needless to say, the tea ceremony will be absurdly expensive. Some people think that restaurants make their money on alcohol drinks. This would not be true of English hotels serving afternoon tea. That is where the profit is.
Drink up!
Ronald P. Stewart
Headmaster
York Prep
