Drink - Victoria Moore takes to drinking tea
Published 18 November 2002
A celebration of tea, the perfect excuse to fall upon the sweetmeats
The ritual of the tea ceremony was borrowed from the Dutch in the late 17th century by a pair of lords whose entourage of ladies were said to have become "passionately enamoured with it as a new thing". But it wasn't until the 1840s, by which time the main meal of the day had been reduced from an eight-hour marathon beginning just before four to an altogether tidier event, that the practice of taking tea in the afternoon began. Ladies with not a great deal to do had already introduced luncheon to fill the long daytime hours. It was a small step from here to plug the gap between lunch and dinner not with cake and wine but with an afternoon brew.
Heaven forbid that elegant ladies today do anything so ill-advised as to ingest caffeine, let alone eat cake, which I am sure the Atkins diet forbids at any time of day. But I have myself become rather enamoured of afternoon tea.
In Portugal recently to taste port, I had lunch of the size one can only manage when manners dictate that you eat it all up (four large and extremely rustic sausages to begin, starchy onion soup with more smoked sausages lurking at the bottom, a piece of beef the size of a hedgehog). Then we went upriver and unfurled ourselves on to the beautiful terrace at Quinta de la Rosa. Sophia, whose family has run the vineyard since her grandmother was given the land as a christening present, emerged wearing shorts and covered in paint, her quintessential Englishness counterpointing the Douro's parched steep slopes.
As I say, we had come to taste port. But Sophia offered us tea in faded china and we fell upon it. We weren't going to burden our stomachs further with the home-baked biscuits or butter cake ("delicious with port") until told they were from a recipe devised by this famous grandmother, considered thoroughly eccentric because she kept a good kitchen and insisted on having proper provisions brought up the valley from Oporto. They were very good.
To enjoy afternoon tea properly, however, requires some restraint. Last week, on holiday in Mallorca, I took breakfast every morning and nothing else until, after a day of exercise, tea suggested itself in late afternoon. We drank it by the pot on the terrace overlooking orange orchards and, unfailingly, the girls at the hotel tucked some little sweetmeat - one day cinnamon cake, the next macaroons, the next a crumbly, buttery biscuit - on to the tray.
Back home, I always have tea at five. I have always maintained that this is the only time of day at which it is possible properly to enjoy a rich slice of Christmas cake, perhaps with a segment of Wensleydale cheese. And it is just the season.
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