Recipe: About High Tea and Elevenses

HIGH TEA AND ELEVENSES
From: Eater's Digest by Lorraine Bodger

High tea, the elaborate three-course late-afternoon affair that Americans think of as quintessentially British, has pretty much gone the way of the Raj. Not that any Brit skips the afternoon cuppa (possibly with a bit of nosh to accompany it), but true high tea is now an event mostly for special occasions, ladies of leisure, and tourists.

High tea is a sequence of tea sandwiches, scones (and perhaps crumpets), and assorted small pastries, cakes, and sweets. The thin crustless sandwiches might contain fillings of watercress, smoked salmon, cucumber, ham, tiny shrimp, egg mayonnaise (egg salad), or chicken mayonnaise. The raisin-studded scones are small and freshly baked, and served with Devonshire clotted cream and fruit preserves (and sometimes with lemon curd, too). The assortment of sweets might include tiny fruit tarts, trifle, cream puffs, petits fours, creme caramel, or ripe strawberries. And the tea? Darjeeling, Assam, Earl Grey, Lapsang souchong, jasmine, mint, chamomile, with several more choices if none of these suits. The tea is always steeped in the leaf (loose) in a fine china teapot kept hot and filled. Teabags are unwelcome at high tea.

There's another ruffle on the tea story - something called a "cream tea." This ritual originated in Devon, in the southwest of England, where they make the famous Devonshire clotted cream you always get with high teas and without which there would be no cream teas. Clotted cream is simply a very thick unsweetened cream. To make it, rich milk is heated gently until a thick layer of cream forms on the surface; when the cream is cool, it's spooned off and refrigerated. A cream tea is less elaborate than a high tea; scones topped with clotted cream and fruit preserves, served with pots and pots of steaming tea. You can have cream teas all over England these days, not just in Devon, but whether you'll get homemade clotted cream or something out of a jar anywhere is in serious question.

The English drink tea all the time, morning, noon, and night, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they also punctuate the day with the odd cup of tea. The mid-morning tea break has been dubbed elevenses, referring to the hour of eleven AM., and it's like our requisite midmorning coffee break. Tucked in between a light modern breakfast (the traditional heavy-duty English breakfast having also pretty much gone the way of the Ra]) and a light modern lunch, a cup of tea and a biscuit or two - a biscuit to a Brit is a cookie to a Yank - perks up the flagging spirit and revs up the flagging worker.