Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  Back in the languorous afternoon of the eighteenth-century aristocrat’s drawing room, a little something to eat was needed to go with the beautiful tea. It wasn’t a full-blown meal. The whole point was to tide you over until dinner, not rob you of your appetite. The first dish to be served with tea was white bread and butter. White flour was more expensive to produce, and considered better the more it was refined. The creamy butter gently balanced the drying effect of the tannins on the palate. A slice of bread and butter enhanced rather than overpowered the tea, like the white tablecloth beneath an extravagantly set table or the plain mount around an oil painting.

  But it’s often cold and damp in Britain. Imagine those huge, draughty drawing rooms before central heating. Something warm was called for. And here began the brief story of the tea muffin. It is now known as the English muffin, the sort Americans eat with eggs and hollandaise sauce for breakfast. Muffins started out in domed silver dishes on British tea tables. But the thing about muffins is that they really need to be made fresh. They fell out of favour when people no longer had cooks to make them every afternoon.

  As black teas from the colonies became prominent, different dishes were needed to accompany them. These teas were darker, stronger and more astringent. Tannin was a more dominant part of the flavour profile. That’s where scones with clotted cream and jam came in. People didn’t put milk and sugar in their tea – they ate creamy, sweet dishes with it.

  It was during the Second World War that milk came into common use. The war was a leveller of taste. Everyone had the same tea, duchess or dustman. Whereas it was considered rather bad form to put milk in a fine China tea, the cheap, rationed stuff required it to balance out the bitterness. The milk embellished rather than diminished the tea, like slipping a boxing glove over a fist, softening the impact of the punch but not its power.

  To some older British people it can seem a kind of betrayal to aspire to having fine food or good tea. It’s as if by choosing something better they might be getting above themselves and losing touch with those wonderfully egalitarian times when everyone was in it together. Every stratum of society fought alongside one another and got the same ration books. Britons worked so effectively side by side, without the upstairs–downstairs divisions, that in peacetime they continued to look after one another, regardless of means. The National Health Service was established to provide free universal healthcare for all at the point of need, truly something to be proud of and to hold onto. But we are no longer rationed. It’s not a betrayal to go back to buying the best tea we can afford. Indeed, if we are going to come to the aid of our brothers and sisters in need on a global scale, by buying better tea and supporting tea farmers we are honouring those traditions more fully.

  The idea of a tea table heavy with cakes and sweet abundance was another product of the war years. The warm fireside treats and comfort described by Tolkien in his cosy hobbit holes, and by A. A. Milne, who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh and adapted Wind in the Willows for the stage, came from the imaginations of men who had fought in the First World War. They depicted groaning tea tables rich in domestic detail, a lavish contrast to the privations and chaos of the trenches. For the children of the Blitz, deprived of sweets because of the sugar rationing and huddled in shelters and Underground stations to escape the bombs raining down on their cities and towns, such stories gave them something to dream about.

  In reality, afternoon tea was a beautifully made pot of tea with a plate or two of something delicious to complement the infusion. Even in the grandest hotels it was a simpler affair than we now expect. This is a review of Claridge’s by Jonathan Routh in his 1966 Good Cuppa Guide: Where to Have Tea in London:

  Tea is served in a discreet corner of the main lounge by a rather splendid man with a lot of gold buttons on his tails and gold braid elsewhere. Eight other customers there when I was, all French. Two of us were given a plate containing nine sandwiches 2” x 1”, each one a masterpiece of the thin slicer’s art, and between them the equivalent in weight of one half of a North Circular Road sandwich. From the choice of pastries I took a 4” eclair that looked very weak and emaciated but tasted exquisite. Also, in an attempt to throw the man in gold, I asked for a muffin, and got it. The tea itself was fair, and the bill, 15s for two of us.

  Of the Connaught he says:

  Rather disappointing compared with lunch or dinner here. Served in a small lounge, the occupants of which all appear to be American mobsters. The bill for a pot of tea for two was 7s.

  Nowhere in the book is there any mention of the three-stage meal that has become the norm. That idea of sandwiches and then scones followed by cakes and pastries seems to have developed in the 1970s. It’s the standard now, of course, but it’s a relatively modern invention rather than a sacred tradition. Done well, it is the delicious tea feast those wartime writers envisaged. But it has become increasingly ornate and more and more about the fancy cakes and fizzy wine and less and less about tea. Champagne isn’t great with sweet food. If you do go for a glass, try to neck it with the savoury sandwiches at the start. By the time you move on to the scones, tea is a much better accompaniment, as intended.

  ‘Afternoon’ might extend, absurdly, from eleven in the morning until eleven at night, to cram in the tourist bookings. Innovation is often focused on presentation and the shapes of cakes, with pastry chefs outdoing themselves for social-media attention, rather than on creating flavours to work in harmony with the subject of the meal – tea. And the tea? It really hurts me to see it so carelessly treated and badly abused.

  Please search out places that do it exquisitely, with excellent cakes that taste as good as they look, and with each dish carefully constructed to pair deliciously with beautiful tea, perfectly prepared. And please don’t put up with carelessly brewed leaf when you’re paying for a luxurious experience. If we stand up for our tea and fight against uncaring complacency, we might win ourselves more pleasure.

  I was sitting in a restaurant in Heathrow one day, waiting for a flight, drinking coffee. The woman beside me ordered English Breakfast tea. She got a huge pot with one teabag dangling inside. There was enough water for three or four cups, but just one bag. Her tea was thin and weak. I watched her pour milk into it and the cup turned a sickening grey. She winced as she drank it.

  I asked her if it was as horrible as it looked. She said it was.

  When the waiter came to give her the bill, he asked, ‘Was everything alright?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  I mentioned that the tea was rather weak because there was only one teabag in the large pot.

  The waiter looked astounded. ‘I have never had a complaint about the tea.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never!’

  I turned to the woman beside me. ‘Did you like the tea?’

  ‘No, it was pretty terrible.’

  The waiter scowled at her. ‘Why didn’t you say something, madam?’

  She shrugged, embarrassed. When he was gone, she said, ‘It’s how it is. I thought it might be better here, but it wasn’t.’

  The 1970s reinvention of afternoon tea is more feast than pick-me-up. You can’t be expected to get up from the table and think, ‘Right, that’s sorted me out. I’m revived and ready for the evening and dinner.’ You are far more likely to stand up groaning, having consumed all the calories you need for the week ahead, and to be in need of a lie-down to digest it all, like a snake. I’m not saying don’t do it. Far from it. I adore being indulgent, now and then. I love this modern afternoon banquet, just as I sometimes get drunk, knowing a hangover will be inescapable, if the immediate joy of the drinks and the company is worth it.

  Like having lunch with Fergus Henderson.

  A few years ago, I made a bespoke afternoon tea blend with the unconventional addition of oolong, for Fergus and his St John restaurants in London. He wanted a tea to go with three plump buns to be served in the afternoon.

  The three buns, soft and round as bottoms, were individually st
uffed with anchovy butter, prune jam and dark chocolate fondant. Not an easy combination to pair with a single tea, but I really did come up with a very decent blend that worked sublimely with each flavour. It’s one of my proudest achievements. I shouldn’t really have told you that the secret was the oolong. Blending is a hard-won skill that I get rewarded handsomely for, but I couldn’t resist showing off. It was an early triumph and I still feel triumphant about it. I shouldn’t be saying that either. We’re not supposed to brag. Nice British people are trained to say we are fine when things are falling apart and quite good when they are wonderful.

  Not many months later we were having lunch, a long and very lovely lunch, as lunches with Fergus always are. After pudding I ordered the bespoke blended tea, and Fergus ordered a prune eau de vie from the Agen area of France called Vieille Prune. I ordered one too, just to be polite, of course, and Fergus reciprocated with the tea. I popped the Vieille Prune into my tea, like a hot toddy. I was pretty sure the flavours would work together, having created that tea for a prune bun. Fergus wasn’t quite so bemused once he’d tasted it. But he did say it might need some tweaks to make a decent drink.

  When questioned, his answers were elusive and didn’t offer any precise instructions, just some general ideas to mull over. Fergus is far more poet than didact. We arranged that one evening Fergus and his wife Margot, also a much admired chef, would come for dinner and the three of us would conjure up a recipe for the Prune Tease.

  We sat in my kitchen and drank, for the sake of research and experimentation, buckets of tea and Vieille Prune. I think there may also have been some wine with the steaks. It’s a bit hazy. Margot and Fergus are truly brilliant company. Fergus is patient, gracious and incredibly kind. He is so well loved for good reason. Margot is fearless, strong, funny and full of verve.

  Without a lot of fuss, they have changed the world. The concept of nose-to-tail cooking, using every part of the animal and not just concentrating on the expensive cuts, was returned to the forefront of British cooking at St John in the 1990s. Using simple, fresh, seasonal ingredients was revolutionary back then, as was paying tender attention to those ingredients rather than relying on showboating techniques. They championed convivial hospitality over fussy formality and turned the culinary world around, so much so that this approach seems normal now and Nouvelle Cuisine is quite forgotten.

  I fell down fully dressed beneath the table when they left, to wake at dawn, stiff and cold, and then elated when I remembered what fun we’d had and that we’d created the best cocktail known to humankind. Sober, it is still damn fine.

  MAKING AN AFTERNOON TEA PRUNE TEASE

  The Tea Infusion

  Make 100ml of tea (enough for four servings) by infusing 3g of St John Breakfast Blend and 1g of Tie Guan Yin or Milk Oolong in 100ml of boiling water for three minutes. (As St John no longer serve the buns, the bespoke afternoon tea blend we used is no longer available, but this alternative blend is a good substitute.)

  Per Serving

  25ml infused tea

  25ml La Vieille Prune

  25ml Carpano Antica Formula vermouth

  Strain the tea, pour it into a shaker and put the shaker in an ice bucket. Leave to cool for five minutes.

  Into the shaker add the Vieille Prune and the vermouth. Add some ice and stir slowly with a bar spoon until cold. Strain.

  For the garnish, cut a small piece of soft prune and a long, thin slice of lemon zest. Coil together and secure with a cocktail stick.

  *

  There is one more English afternoon ritual, high tea, that I want to explain. High tea and afternoon tea are not the same thing, or at least they didn’t use to be. The terms have become interchangeable, especially outside the United Kingdom. I think that might have something to do with the misconception that ‘high’, in the original context, meant ‘grand’.

  ‘High’ in this regard actually had to do with the elevation of the drinkers’ bottoms, or at least the seats on which they sat. Afternoon tea was taken in the drawing room, not the dining room. It wasn’t a formal meal served at table but a lighter, more relaxed affair, enjoyed from the comfort of the sofa. High tea, on the other hand, was a small meal, taken with tea, eaten at an earlier hour than dinner and served at a table. It was a meal defined by circumstance. If dinner couldn’t be eaten at the proper time because of a train or a theatre performance, a quick afternoon dish (traditionally savoury, such as Welsh rarebit) got you through. It being too early for a glass of wine, you substituted a stamina-boosting pot of tea.

  It was, as far as I can tell, the raised position of the dining table that supplied the word ‘high’. What it wasn’t was high in terms of its status, as in ‘high class’. I don’t think anyone but gangsters in 1930s black-and-white films have ever really used that phrase. I can hear James Cagney saying, ‘She was a high-class dame,’ but I don’t think a duchess would have used those words, certainly not to describe something she ate.

  Tea in the afternoon, whatever the position of our bottoms, is there to entertain and sustain us. We might not sit down to an elaborate meal, but there are worse things to do at 4 p.m. than indulge in an Earl Grey and a piece of shortbread. A delicious cup of tea always helps.

  CHAPTER 15

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  The only time tea doesn’t fix me is when I’m truly beaten by jet lag. It can take a body so far, but there is an inevitable collapse. China and Japan are often my ruin. Back in 2015, I went all the way to Tokyo to make sure the tea infusions at the Noma restaurant pop-up were perfect, and I almost slept through an entire day, despite dosing myself liberally.

  I dumped my bags at the hotel, sent the documents I’d been working on during the flight, and ventured straight out into the bright cold to have lunch with a Japanese designer. The tea was so good, I noted it down. We started with gyokuro infused gently at 50°C. We drank two long infusions like that, then one slightly hotter and faster at 70°C. There was a fourth infusion of that same tea with fresh shiso leaves added. (Shiso is a member of the mint family that’s widely used in Japanese cuisine.) We then ate the exhausted leaves with soy sauce, a dab of miso paste and slivers of hamachi (yellowtail) sashimi. Next came three kinds of bancha, a late-harvest Japanese green tea. One was surprisingly sour but good served beside a piece of rare beef.

  Our drinking was interspersed with tiny courses of food: little morsels of loveliness to enhance the tea. A mackerel dish was served with a hojicha, a roasted Japanese green tea; a sweet mochi cake was paired with matcha. It was a beautiful matcha carefully whisked and artfully presented. The woman making our tea stood behind the counter-top table in a white lab coat with a bunch of biros in her top pocket. There was no kimono or fussing about with sleeves. She looked more like a scientist than a geisha; an elegant, strong scientist but with a geisha’s controlled grace. With a carved bamboo ladle she transferred the water from a cast-iron pot set over a discreet heat. She poured it from one exquisite vessel to another to reduce the temperature, picking up each item and implement with exact moves. Small softly gleaming canisters held the tea. Each teapot and cup was hand-made and subtly imperfect. She served us solemnly, with measure and restraint. I could never be like that. I do love to watch, but I am brutish and clumsy beside a Japanese tea lady. I am too full of vigour and joy when I make tea.

  After lunch I went back to the hotel to shower and then met up with Joe Warwick, a journalist friend from London who was in town to cover the Noma story. The Copenhagen restaurant had moved to a temporary site in a Tokyo hotel for six weeks. It had been voted best restaurant in the world many times over and the excitement surrounding its stay was so intense that sixty thousand people had tried to make reservations.

  We went to find a yakitori restaurant we’d been recommended. We had an address, but in Japan there are no street numbers. It was bitterly cold once the sun had set; our breath clouded the freezing air and the neon lights blurred. It took us ages to find the place, which had no English sign. Finally, we took
our seats at the bar and tried skewers of hearts and cartilage and skin and shiitake mushrooms, and amazing silky white tofu in beautiful deep purple bowls. We ordered good sake, though it was a humble place, and they seemed pleased and nodded.

  We ended up in a Hooters bar, drinking excellent Japanese whisky. I can’t really explain why, other than to tell you we saw the sign. The waitresses wore very tight T-shirts and very short shorts. At that time you could smoke inside any bar in Tokyo, although there were only designated pens on the street where you were allowed to light up, and it wasn’t permitted to walk with a lit cigarette. I thought it would be nice to have one, as I sometimes stupidly did, and I asked the men sitting around the bar with us, puffing away in silence, if I might have one of theirs. I got offered several whole packets and inside the lids they had written their phone numbers. I was the only female customer in the place.

  At 3 a.m. I arrived back at the hotel, smithereened in my level of smashedness, buzzing from the joy of the day and night, shaking from exhaustion. My senses were still jangling as I lay down on the bed, feeling as though I was falling through the mattress into darkness. I didn’t even have time to get under the covers before consciousness abandoned me. On hearing the alarm at 9 a.m., I jumped up and made tea. I showered and made more tea. I dressed and drank a third pot. Leaning back against the pillows to enjoy the sencha, I fell back to sleep.

  Tea had not saved me. The empty cup was still in my hands at 2.30 p.m., when my eyes opened to a knock at the door from housekeeping. I had just enough time to run to Noma for the 3 p.m. meeting.