A cuppa

This is yet another far overdue post that I scrawled out back in Yorkshire (something like two weeks ago?) but set aside until I downloaded my camera's photos. Which I've FINALLY done. So, this has nothing to do with my current adventures (mostly riding a reindeer around yelling about lutefisk and humming Grieg tunes). That's right: we are living in the past.

I thought I’d toss up a quick post about tea. Read on, old beans, read on, knowing that while I will adopt the tone of somebody who has Done Research And Knows Things, I in fact know nothing and am guessing or wildly conjecturing at everything. (This is a good disclaimer for the blog and my life as a whole.) Tea: after the jump!

Yr humble author awaiting his friggin' TEA. (Note: the can of Irn Bru was offered as a gesture of "welcome to Scotland, if you haven't tried this you are obligated to, but if you have tried it, please do not drink it, for it is nasty." It was not consumed at this ultimately-classy event.

One of the more wonderfully thoughtful things that Kate and Stuart did for me on my Bristol visit was to immediatelyput out a spread of All Foods British. (Save Marmite, because my friends love me and do not want to hurt me.) Pork pie, an array of English cheeses, Scotch egg, local ciders and ales, the whole bit. And the first morning I woke up in their place, Stuart had a cup of tea waiting for me, as well as scones with cream and jam. (It was the fastest I'd ever gone from awake-to-breakfast, and made me feel Deeply Loved. Thanks, Stuart!)

This past week, in York, I revisited tea and scones at Betty’s, a storied tea shop in Yorkshire (though I think they’ve expanded beyond) in a traditional afternoon tea. And oh, kittens. This is what we’re here to discuss.

The afternoon tea consists of a pot of tea (OBviously; at Betty's it's looseleaf with delightfully intricate pouring tools), a series of small sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream and jam, and small cakes or sweets. It looks a bit like this, only pretend the photographer had remembered to take a photo BEFORE he started digging into the sandwiches:

The beauty of the afternoon tea is this: working the plates from bottom to top, your food gets sweeter and richer as your tea continues to steep, getting sharper and more tannic. So the sandwiches are accompanied by a light, toasted, nutty brew, the scones by a richer and more bracing one, and by the time you reach the sweets, the tea is a perfect counterpoint, a bracing, tongue-coating pinch counter-punching the velvety sweetness of the tarts, chocolates, cakes. It's a perfectly calibrated trajectory.

Afternoon tea is lovely, but it's hefty and not, for me, an everyday affair, because I am not a dowager countess or aggressively rotund (any more). Take away the sandwiches and the sweets and you’re left with a cream tea, the centerpiece of the ritual: scone, cream, jam, tea. And this by itself is a glorious thing.

There is, I have learned, a raging (by British standards) controversy over the proper assemblage of the cream scone. Stuart was quite firm on this point: after slicing the scone, the clotted cream goes on first, followed by the jam. This is then reassembled into a kind of sandwich. However, when I set to this ritual at a café in York, before even trying the sandwiching, my waitress goggled at me and said “That’s quite the long way round of doing things, innit? Strange man…”

Turns out it’s a regional thing, with additional disputes breaking out over the kind of cream used (never aerosol, but clotted versus heavy whipped seems to be an actual debate) and the reassembly is a thing often disputed as well.

Tea at home in Scotland! Not my home, not my tea. Good golly this was swell too. As I type this I'm realizing that "swell" and "golly" are probably the largest words in the word-cloud version of this blog. OH WELL GOODBYE FOREVER

After a week and change of cream teas (and one afternoon tea), I think I can definitively say that the Correct Scone Method is: scone sliced in half, clotted cream first, followed by jam, and (crucially) no reassembly. Each half, coated with the proper ingredients, makes a perfect bite, and once again, the Yorkshire tea nicely balances the potentially cloying flavors of the cream scone. (Though places that make their own clotted cream and jam present almost universally perfectly-balanced scones, so the tea is just a nice sparring partner and not a corrective.)

So, that’s tea, by which I suppose we really mean “the food that comes along with tea.” Frankly, even the cream tea can usually very adroitly stand in for lunch (and has done almost every day that I’ve had it here). The drink itself is a bit less ubiquitous at least from what I’ve seen – not in terms of being on offer, but locals certainly seem mostly to opt for espresso drinks when out at the cafes – but this is a place where tradition is held in very high regard, so tea isn’t going anywhere. I KNOW YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT TEA GOING AWAY IN ENGLAND, IT WAS SOMETHING WE ALL WORRIED ABOUT BUT DON’T BE SCARED, TEA’S STILL A THING.

More to come on Yorkshire, but given that I have largely avoided obsessive food-centric posts on this blog (really, didn’t we all expect a lot worse?) I hope this entry on “things I’ve eaten and my Opinions About Them” has been deeply spiritually enlightening. G’bye for now, chumps!