An elegant American tea ceremony (with no thought to pairing)! - Part 1

In the process of cleaning out my house, found my aunt's copy of Etiquette by Emily Post, published in 1928. Originally published in 1922, this book was the guide for women of the middle class, or moving into it, with aspirations for upper class status in the flapper era.

Was curious to see what Mrs. Post had to say about tea. 

Afternoon tea was a decidedly ceremonial event in those days, even if quite different in both style and substance from, say, a Japanese tea ceremony. Mrs. Post details the table setting, and speaks specifically to the "curate," the correct name for the "stand made of three small shelves, each just big enough for one good-sized plate" with "always two, usually three, varieties of cake and hot breads."

She goes on to say that "the top dish on the "curate," therefore, should be a covered one, and hold hot bread of some sort*; the two lower dishes may be covered or not, according to whether additional food is hot or cold; the second dish usually holds sandwiches and the third cake."

She further notes that "selection of afternoon tea food is entirely a matter of whim, and new food-fads sweep through communities...A fad of a certain group in New York is bacon and hot biscuit sandwiches and fresh hot gingerbread. Let it be hoped for the sake of the small household that it will die out rather than become epidemic, since gingerbread and biscuits must both be made every afternoon, and the bacon is another item that comes from a range."**

I'll be quoting some more from this fascinating book in future posts — among other things about the order of speech in such a tea (= who says what to whom when!)- but if I have whetted your appetite for more on the American Tea Ceremony, go to http://www.foodtimeline.org/teatime.html#americantea.

Meanwhile, here's a modern Thai-American interpretation of a curate by Bambu Thai in Richardson Texas, sent to me by Friend of Pairteas Marzi Pecen (http://www.pecen.net):

* Note that this is usually the only tier on which a dome can fit!

** The history of ranges is another fascinating subject...suffice it to say here that in Mrs. Post's day the labor of tending to a coal range was significant, further augmented if you wanted to make several dishes at a time. If you were lucky enough to have either a gas range or an electric range, both of which were just then starting to come into general use, these appliances usually had only a single oven, so making a whole array of different baked goods and hot dishes required careful planning. However, many people still had both the old coal range and the new-fangled electric or gas range, so perhaps making all these dishes fresh could be accomplished—by the hard-working servant, of course!