Pie Fidelity by Pete Brown

Author:Pete Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846149603
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Another, similar mention occurs in September 1942, when a Food Enforcement Inspector basically entraps a Mrs Lily Crocker of Willis Farm, Bickleigh, South Devon. Under the headline ‘Inspector has a Cream Tea’ the Western Morning News tells how Mr Sidney Snell visited the farm and asked for tea for one and was given ‘a pot of tea, milk, sugar, bread and butter, plain bread, as well as jam, and a glass of cream about three or four ounces’. Because milk was rationed, she was fined £5 for making cream and £5 for selling it.

You’ll have spotted straightaway that the bread and butter in these stories means whatever the Cornishman’s correspondent and Western Morning News’ sub-editor thought of as a cream tea doesn’t meet our modern definition. That’s why the Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest reference as being a 1964 novel, Picture of Millie by Philip Maitland Hubbard, a murder mystery set in the West Country, which contains the line, ‘We just bathe and moon about and eat cream teas,’ but even that doesn’t specify what these cream teas consist of. Aargh!

The notion of a ‘cream tea’ may go back a long way, but the term itself is, at most, only a century old. And the very strict stipulation that a cream tea contains only clotted cream, jam and scones is much more recent than that. It’s striking that what has become such ornate ceremony and etiquette around the cream tea is such a recent invention and emerged at a time when rules and etiquette in food and drink generally were in retreat. We need our rituals, and over the past few decades we’ve chosen the cream tea as the meal around which they coalesce over any other.

One e-book I found – The Great British Cream Tea, published in 2017 by Rupert Matthews – is perfectly representative of every other guide I’ve found on how to eat a cream tea. From the outset I should say that, to me, it seems pretty obvious: pour the tea, spread the jam and cream on the scone, eat the scone and drink the tea. But no, it’s far more complicated than that. ‘Etiquette demands’ – demands, not suggests – that it be served at 4 p.m. The jam and clotted cream ‘need’ to be decanted into small serving dishes. You ‘should’ have a bone-china tea service, and of course you ‘should’ use a lighter tea such as Earl Grey or Darjeeling rather than ‘builder’s tea’. Then there’s the vexed question of tea or milk first into the cup. Matthews informs us that Orwell’s preference for tea first was shared by the upper classes, because expensive porcelain could withstand the heat while cheaper china might crack. Pour hot tea straight in without the cooling milk and you were subtly bragging about the quality of your tea service.

Another online guide tells us that it is ‘unacceptable’ to reheat scones rather than have them freshly baked, that they should be two and a half inches in diameter and as wide as they are round.

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