Afternoon Tea: a Comedy of Errors

Afternoon Tea is a practice that came about in England when a certain noble lady (we’re looking at you, Anna, seventh Duchess of Bedford) got peckish around 4pm while awaiting the evening meal, which was usually served quite late. Anna began asking for a tray of tea with bread, butter, and cakes to be brought to her in the afternoon to tide her over until dinner was served later. She began inviting friends, and the practice became popular, whether it was a picnic on the terrace or a gathering in the drawing room.

I don’t have a terrace or a drawing room. I’ve got a patio and a bar. I’m a lowly suburban American Dad, with the attendant bad jokes and bad back, the stress and the fat gut that come from spending too much time sitting at a desk and not enough riding bikes and hiking and climbing trees. Still, having afternoon tea with my family seemed like a good way to explore tea sandwiches, those crustless dainties served on a silver tray with tea and scones and cakes.

I borrowed a book of Afternoon Tea recipes from our local library for inspiration. Some of the recipes I used, which I will not reproduce here, came from this book. Others came from the Internet. The recipes from the book… well, I didn’t have great luck with them. I’m not going to name the book, as I don’t like saying anything bad about someone’s work, and also because it’s entirely possible my own ineptitude caused my problems with their recipes. Or at least I’m sure that’s what the authors would tell me if I slagged them off here. So I won’t.

I decided on the following menu:

• bacon-leek tarts
• crumpets
• cucumber sandwiches
• cheddar-apple sandwiches
• smoked salmon sandwiches
• coronation chicken sandwiches
• egg and cress sandwiches
• tea bread
• apple cake

What? you may be asking yourself? No scones? I thought about it. But the more scone recipes I looked at, the more I realized, they’re just biscuits. Of course, biscuits are what Brits call cookies, so I suppose they need another word for biscuits, and scones is what they came up with. I understand that “tea without scones is like a meal without a fork” according to afternoon tea etiquette. However, that is far from the least couth thing I’ll do this week I’m sure.

I started with the tea bread, which I baked the night before the tea party. The recipe, which came from the book, called for soaking a premium mixture of dried fruits (I used apricots, mixed berries, mango, pineapple, and dates) in boiling water, then mixing with an egg and self-rising flour and sprinkling demerara sugar on top. The ratio seemed a bit off though once I started mixing. The dough barely came together, was quite dry and shaggy in fact, and there wasn’t much rise to the bread. Perhaps I used too large a loaf pan. It tasted fine–I like it quite a bit, to be honest–but it was denser and drier than I expected.

The night before, I also prepared the coronation chicken salad that I would use in sandwiches the day of. Coronation chicken is a very British curried chicken salad dish, using dried fruits and curry powder. It’s sweet and a little spicy, and I made it once before when writing about British Rail sandwiches. This time I used this recipe from the New York Times, and it turned out great.

On the morning of the party, I did some more baking from the book. I made bacon and leek tartlets, where the crust again just barely came together (and only after I added about twice as much water as the recipe recommended) but that may not be uncommon for pie crusts. The filling contained some of my homemade garlic and black pepper bacon, with thinly sliced leeks sauteed in the bacon fat, goat cheese, egg, and a little Dijon mustard. The recipe called for prebaking the crusts, then baking these tartlets for 50 minutes. When I pulled them at 43 minutes, they were already quite dark. The flavor was good, though the egg filling had dried out a bit.

The apple cake recipe also came from the book. Again, I added quite a bit more milk than the recipe called for just to get the batter to stick to itself, and I think I managed to achieve a good consistency in the end. Again, the flavor was great, especially with some whipped cream on top. But a pattern was emerging.

Just before serving tea, I made crumpets. I began with a crumpet recipe from the book, which called for a hydration ratio of around 67%, and then called it a batter. This “batter” had the texture of a slightly stiff bread dough. It was not something that could be poured into rings and cooked on a griddle. I could have shaped it into baguettes. I quickly looked up a few crumpet recipes on my phone to double-check. The average hydration recipe on these was more like 170%! I adjusted my approach. I won’t say the crumpets were perfect, but by the time I was finished making them, I think I had the process down, and I made at least one that looked like a crumpet should look. Freshly toasted, slathered with melting butter and some of my homemade peach jam, they were a hit.

So despite a questionable recipe source, I managed to make some edible treats for our afternoon tea. But what about the sandwiches?

Yes, this is still a sandwich site. I made five varieties of tea sandwiches, using white bread for some, wheat bread for some, and a combination of the two for others, depending on which fillings I thought would work better with which bread.

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First off, the coronation chicken sandwiches, which I made on both wheat and white bread, buttered, with leaf lettuce. I just really like curry flavors, even filtered through excessively sweet English tastes. Lucky for me, this one was not Mindy’s or Ian’s favorite, and I got to eat most of them myself.

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Egg and cress was not my favorite when I wrote about British Rail sandwiches, perhaps because I could not source cress at the time and used arugula instead. Arugula does have a peppery flavor, but not the pungent mustardy bite that cress has. I start to get the appeal now, though I think I still prefer an American-style egg salad with yellow mustard in it.

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I wanted to do a cheese sandwich, but I didn’t want to buy another jar of Branston pickle, so I combined it with crisp Braeburn apples instead. Cheddar and apple is a good combination, though I could have used a slightly sweeter apple, or a slightly less sharp cheddar. Not quite the harmonious pairing I was hoping for, but tasty nonetheless.

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Many websites I consulted for tea sandwich recipe ideas have some form of a smoked salmon sandwich listed, and I’m into it. Instead of butter, I made an herbed cream cheese with dill and chives, and along with the whole grain wheat bread and a thin layer of cucumber, this was a robust sandwich for such a dainty occasion.

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Finally, the requisite cucumber sandwiches. When I wrote about cucumber sandwiches four years ago and tried the British style so ubiquitous to afternoon teas, I didn’t care for them much, preferring the American style open-face cream cheese and dill on cocktail rye variety. Here, I combined the two takes, spreading butter on one slice of bread and the same herbed cream cheese I used for the smoked salmon sandwiches on the other. This worked for me, not overwhelming the cucumber with a double layer of cream cheese, but giving a little additional punch to the normally milquetoast drawing room delicacy.

Overall, it was quite a bready spread.

There are three of us in the house now with the oldest two away at college, and this was far too much food for just the three of us. With afternoon tea spreads like this, it’s no wonder that teacups and saucers come in sets of 12.

Oh, man! Teacups and saucers. I spent so much effort and planning on the food that I didn’t take into account that I don’t have any teacups and saucers. Nor do I have a proper teapot. Our eldest, Damian, has dozens of varieties of loose tea leaves along with probably every implement for making tea known to man at his apartment down at his college. He could recite to you the history of mankind’s obsession with drinking the stuff. Unfortunately, I am not a tea person. I have a pot for boiling water, a box of Earl Grey teabags, and a collection of random coffee mugs.

Oh well.

Drink up, folks. This is my favorite kind of tea party. How about you? Any favorite tea sandwiches I missed that you’d like to tell me about?