By Susannah Hickling
What could be more British or more delicious than afternoon tea?
It was a glorious summer afternoon when my visiting French friend and I popped into a teashop in the charming medieval town of Dunster in Somerset. There, within sight of the old yarn market, we gorged on huge homemade scones heaped high with local clotted cream and strawberry jam, and sipped tea from pretty blue and white china teacups that clinked delicately when we placed them on their saucers. It was a quintessential English ritual and my friend was delighted.
Tea-rific story
Afternoon tea in Britain has a fascinating past. Its invention in the 1840s is attributed to Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford. Feeling peckish around 5pm and knowing dinner wouldn’t be served until close to 9pm, she asked her servants for bread and butter and cake to go with her habitual cup of tea. She started inviting her friends to join her for tea at her home, Woburn Abbey. Queen Victoria was a close confidant, so it’s possible that’s how the monarch adopted the habit herself. In any event, a new tradition was born.
The craze affected society in sometimes surprising ways. It influenced fashion, from Victorian ladies’ loose tea gowns, designed to be worn without corsets while entertaining at home, to the colourful tea dresses of the post-Second World War era – and even those we’re wearing this summer. The women’s suffrage movement grew in strength thanks to discussions over tea and cakes in drawing rooms and tea rooms.
Tea dances were all the rage from around 1910. During the Second World War, they were a place for soldiers to unwind by jiving or dancing the Lindy Hop. Countless couples met and married thanks to a social event based on afternoon tea!
Who would have thought a steaming cuppa, accompanied by dainty sandwiches and cakes – not to mention the classic cream tea – could be so embedded in our culture?
Storm in a teacup?
But where there’s a concept, there’s controversy. Do you put the tea or the milk in first? Originally, if you wanted to show you had a superior tea service, you poured the hot tea first in the certain knowledge the china wouldn’t crack. But experts say that adding the milk first gives a better taste.
The battle about whether to spread cream or jam on your scone first continues to rage too. In Devon, it’s clotted cream before the jam – and Devon is the home of the cream tea, right? With that argument settled, you can start fighting over how to pronounce ‘scone’.
What’s hard to dispute is the unique pleasure of afternoon tea, whether it’s in a summer garden or beside a roaring fire in winter, whether you’re sitting in a cosy café or living it up at the Ritz.
Afternoon Tea Week runs from 11-17 August. For more information, visit www.afternoontea.co.uk.
