Tea Table
The beauty of a tea table lies in its simplicity and in the convenience and taste with which it is arranged. Comparatively few women know how to make one inexpensive and attractive. A small silver creamer and sugar bowl impart a certain elegance to the simplest table. Both must be small and should rest on the tray. Lemon cut in small pieces, a slice quartered, is the proper size. Tea served with brandied cherries is delicious and it is always well to have a bottle of preserved cherries on hand.
For an ordinary afternoon tea, fill a cup with cherries and pour over them sufficient brandy to cover. Let it steep well in the cup until the guests arrive, then empty the cherries into a pretty glass bowl. The cherry bowl accompanies the sugar, cream and lemon on the tray, that is passed after the tea has been served. A silver bonbon tongs may be laid on top of the cherries. One cherry is dropped into a cup.
The stiffness so often experienced where people are calling upon other people whom they do not know very well, can invariably be broken up by offering some sort of refreshments. The act of eating and drinking inevitably destroys self-consciousness and renders all concerned less restrained. It does not matter very much whether it is cider and doughnuts, chocolate and wafers, a cup of tea and a biscuit, or what not, so long as it is something. It adds charm, however, to have whatever is served, brought in deftly and served daintily. one.
Most of this entry is etiquette, but it contains one workable preparation: brandied cherries steeped in a cup and passed with the tea tray. A few notes on what the ingredients meant in 1900.
- The hingeThe recipe fixes no time, only "steep well in the cup until the guests arrive." Long enough to take up the brandy, short enough that already-preserved fruit does not collapse; something under an hour at room temperature would suit. The point is a perfumed cherry, not a boozy mush.
- "Preserved cherries"Most likely whole cherries bottled in syrup, whether home-put-up or bought, rather than the bright red cocktail cherries of later decades. Draining off the syrup before adding brandy keeps the brandy from being diluted into sweetness.
- QuantityA teacup filled with cherries is roughly 6 to 8 oz of fruit, and the brandy needed merely to cover it will be somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 cup — enough cherries for perhaps a dozen cups of tea at one cherry each.
- The brandyAny plain grape brandy or cognac works. Nothing barrel-heavy or oaky is wanted here, since the flavor has to carry through hot tea without fighting it.
- Cherry or lemon, not bothThe tray offers lemon, sugar, cream and cherries so each guest chooses. Cream with lemon will curdle, and the cherry belongs with a plain black tea taken without milk.
- Bonbon tongsA small pair of serving tongs or a slotted spoon does the same job. The original point is that no one reaches into the bowl with fingers.
- Serving to guestsThe cherries carry real alcohol, which is not cooked off. Worth mentioning to anyone at the table who would rather not have it.
- "A slice quartered"Cut the lemon crosswise into thin rounds, then quarter each round. That gives a piece small enough to drop into a cup without splashing.
This page belongs to the era when middle-class American women kept regular "at home" afternoons and callers arrived expecting tea, so cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treated the tea table as a fixed piece of household equipment with its own rules about tray, creamer and tongs. The advice reflects a period when a small silver service was the standard aspiration of a modest household, and when the ritual was as much social technology as refreshment, which is why the writer spends her last lines arguing that food and drink dissolve awkwardness between near-strangers. Brandied and preserved fruits were a normal winter resource in a house that put up its own produce, and dropping one into tea is a domestic cousin of the older practice of flavoring hot drinks with spirits and spiced fruit. The habit of taking tea with lemon rather than milk had spread through fashionable American parlors in the later nineteenth century, generally credited to Russian influence, and the tray described here hedges by offering both.