High Tea

In the last few days I have learned a lot about tea and scones.  As I discussed in my previous post, I got two tea-related cookbooks from friends: one with scone recipes, and one that had miscellaneous recipes for tea.  And when I say tea, I mean Tea, the meal, not tea, the drink.  I have never attended nor hosted Tea.  I don't know much about it.  I have never cooked nor eaten a scone. 

Today I wanted to try out a scone recipe from my new cookbook, and I thought, 'why not serve the scones with tea this afternoon for my husband and I?'  But if I were going to do that I may as well make a couple other little things to eat as well.  Then I figured if I'm going to do all that I should invite over our friends Phil and Jenn, whom we haven't been able to see in quite a while (my darn illness).  So instead of having a little tea with my scone, suddenly I was preparing a full High Tea.

High Tea means a tea service that is much more elaborate and meal-like than just Tea, "regular" Tea.  It is more often served later in the afternoon and can substitute for dinner.  This is all stuff I've learned (from my new book) just in the last couple of days.  Despite the trend that many things served at Tea or High Tea are often sweets, I actually made mostly savory things.  I'm actually pretty proud of myself for what I was able to put together, considering we only have the last bits of miscellaneous stuff in the pantry and fridge, since I'm going grocery shopping tomorrow and hadn't planned on Tea when I last grocery shopped. 

I ended up putting together a few finger sandwiches, some mini lettuce wraps, mini lemon tarts, and of course the scones, which were cheese scones.  I also served toppings for the scones: mustard, marmalade, and get this: homemade carrot butter.  I'm going to talk about the carrot butter in a separate post since it deserves it's own.  Then of course we had every type of tea I had in the house, sugar, vanilla sugar, and milk.  I didn't have any lemons left in the house to serve as wedges and I'm sure some people would think that was highly abnormal, but oh well.  I did what I could.

I got out some of my "good" china (which is nice but not extremely fancy or anything) and put the sugar in the nice china sugar bowl and got out my grandmother's silver footed bowl and did the table up.  The odd thing is that, the one thing I don't own is a teapot.  Nor do I have anything that can really substitute for a teapot.  I just put a pot of boiling water out and we ladled it.  Funny having Tea and realizing you don't have a teapot.  Anyway, we sat and tea'd and ate and talked and it was wonderful.  I will definitely make scones again and also I promised Phil and Jenn that we'll doTea again sometime, hopefully soon. 

Happy tea-ing!