One Lump or Two

Today

A success over the weekend with my cooking. We'd invited the gang from the Wine Circle over to ours and I said I'd provide a cream tea. I prayed for rain, which ensured an afternoon of delightful sunshine and we crowded into our garden for tea, Pimm's and a selection of crustless sandwiches, scones with cream and jam, Victoria Sponge, lemon cake, carrot cake and Pauls' own recipe vanilla ice-cream. Wasps hovered expectantly, undeterred by the number of corpses around the place, and gorged on white wine.

Everything was done to a turn (I must say, I bake a mean scone) and we all (even Agnes who'd scrambled under the tablecloth covering the food, as well as the flies protectors to discover how much she liked the icing on the carrot cake) tucked in. Eventually we were all filled up with delicious carbohydrate and relaxed with tea or Pimm's and exchanged anecdotes. Lyn talked about the sanctity of "high tea" on Sundays when she was a girl. "Well, this is a high tea" she said.

In My Day

"Cream tea" can mean a number of things, but must always include scones, cream and tea. When we were children we rarely went into restaurants but often into tea shops. You could always get tea and bread-and-butter. Scones were available with cream - sometimes clotted which I found a bit too much - and jam. Wasps were often an accompaniment to these delights, crawling up the windowpanes of the tea shops or hovering around if we were outside. There might be a plate of cakes - cream-filled or rock and fairy cakes and it could be a quite a job choosing the right one.

"High tea" had a greater variety of possible definitions. It seemed that this was always eaten on a Sunday and at home was likely to include cheese, ham and salad as well as bread and butter and, maybe, cake. I learnt just how different when visiting other people's houses. A great luxury in those days was tinned salmon and this was often on the table at friends' houses. I was indifferent to its somewhat watery taste and a little put off by the puce colour and soggy texture. There might be pork pies, filled with unidentifiable meat and uneatably rubbery jelly and, a real horror this, tongue. There might be jelly with blancmange or tinned fruit. Fresh fruit was a rarity.

I also learnt quite quickly that some people ate "dinner" at midday when we ate lunch and "tea" meant the evening meal which we called supper. It was only years later that I understood the deep class divide that this reveals. So an invitation to "tea" could mean anything from tea and biscuits to a fully cooked meal. It was impossible to prepare for this without asking awkward question beforehand. It's a bit rude to ask your hosts whether you'll actually get anything to eat!

Paul's family also used to have a high tea on Sundays. I found the amount of carbohydrate that I was expected to put away very daunting and somehow felt full and dyspeptic without feeling satisfied. But Mum was not satisfied with lady-like pickings and was apt to take it amiss if I didn't stuff my face with bread, pastries from Bondolfi's bakery in Meads and the notorious "bung-in" cake. One quickly realises the benefit of tea; it really helps to offset that stodgy feeling.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the opportunity to show off what I can do in the baking line, but am not quite sure I'm up to Lyn's suggestion that we do it once a month.