The Pleasures of Tea

After the other week's dismaying read-through of the Charms of Tea, I decided to jump right in and read the other Victoria Magazine tea books I have (three others!).  This week's offering:  The Pleasures of Tea from 1999.  Like Charms, this book has no author's name on the cover, but the blurb on the book jacket reveals the author to be Kim Waller, who was a Victoria editor.  So we know that the text was written for the book, and not culled from the pages of the magazine.

I began the book with some trepidation, but I was eager to read the text in hopes it would be less horrifying.  It was!!  And it's right in the foreword.  The editor drinks tea from mugs and admits that afternoon tea is a privilege.  The book even acknowledges that people work, and that a tea break can be beneficial at a low point in a business meeting.  What a relief!

The Pleasures of Tea is a bit disorganized but focuses on tea-drinking occasions, equipment, and recipes.  The prose is a little flowery, but inoffensive.  It's also rather brief.  There are three "interviews" in the book - with a tea grower, a tea seller, and a tea salon owner - but all three go into no depth, which is a loss, and could have added greatly to the quality of the book. 

The strong point of Pleasures is the middle section on tea wares.  There are pages of photographs devoted to teapots, Wedgwood, chintzware, etc.  In fact, the book brings in tea equipment right away.  In the first chapter, the Daily Cup, the author says, "There is a ritualistic comfort in using pretty objects you love."  I agree.  I love tea things and devour these sorts of pages eagerly contemplating china patterns to search for, and lamenting that I don't have a strawberry fork.  So for me, the irksome part is the picture captions.  Sometimes they say what the china pattern is, but often not.  And even in the reference pages in the back, they list the photographer of each photo, but no other information such as location or source of the materials.  There are some photos with some great teacup and teapot image fabrics, but if I wanted to find those curtains, I would have no idea where to start!

This is a pretty book to have and read, though by no means perfect. I can't wait to see where the next Vicotria tea book, the Art of Taking Tea, takes us.  Stay tuned!!

Incidentally, this month I used holiday shopping as an excuse to get a bunch of new books (thank you Amazon used books!).  Maybe I'll get to reviews of these titles in the coming year:

• Modern Tea
• How to Do It or The Lively Art of Entertaining
• Tea With a Twist
• Royal Teas with Grace and Style
• A Passion for Tea

The Charms of Tea

When I was in junior high and high school and the world seemed bleak much of the time, one of the things that gave me solace was Victoria Magazine.  Victoria portrayed a fantasy world - a world I very much wanted to live in - where women collected vintage linens, had time to create and tend beautiful gardens, lived in old houses which they rehabbed by themselves and then furnished impeccably, and took time for tea everyday.  I read every issue from cover to cover, even if I fell behind.  And then once I got to college, my mom kept up my subscription, but I stopped reading.  Reality had so much improved that I no longer needed that particular fantasy.  But my love of tea and books about tea grew, and my collection of tea books includes, I think, three books about tea published by Victoria through the years.  Today we'll look at the first of those, The Charms of Tea
which was published in 1991.

The book has no stated author, but may be cobbled together from the pages of the magazine.  There are chapters around a specific theme like the Victorian Tea, the Social Tea, and the Proper Setting, but following one page of text, in and among lovely photographs, are excerpts from literature and selected quotes about tea time, tea parties, etc.  There are snippets from Oscar Wilde, Peter Pan, Rebecca, Anne of Green Gables, and all of the typical quotes one reads in books about tea.

Coming back to this book and the words of Victoria authors after all these years was a bit of a rude awakening.  I know it was always like this, perhaps in the name of creating and sustaining that fantasy of "the beautiful life," but really...   The second paragraph of the introduction reads, "the custom of the afternoon tea has been popular among civilized people for centuries."  It's hard to even begin on that sentence and deal with the judgment-laden text here and all that follows.  Later on, "at 4, every kettle in the empire began to whistle."  Every one?  Really?  I love all kinds of entertaining and tea party paraphernalia, really I do, but even I don't believe that you can't possibly have a tea party if you don't have tea cups of the thinnest bone china.  You can.  You should. 

Possibly my favorite part comes in the back of the book when they are starting in on the recipes.  At the beginning of the first food chapter is the obligatory bit about how to prepare tea.  After all of the nonsense about the china and the sugar tongs and all of that, they say that tea bags are acceptable for tea party use!  It's this little bit that encapsulates the book - this is about tone, and elegance, and home furnishings, and being very upper, but really, the tea itself is of the least importance.  Fascinating...

Text aside, some of the recipes look tempting, especially the quickbreads.   I really want to make the milk and honey bread with honey butter.  It's possible that you might see raspberry and lemon curd hearts sometime soon...

In 2003, Victoria went out of print.  It was resurrected in 2007.  In all fairness, I have not read the new version, and I have no idea if the text or the tone is the same as the version I read and enjoyed back in the day.  Does anyone know?

My overwhelming feeling is that Martha took over where Victoria left off - for me, anyway.  And as much as I still want to look and dress like a Gibson Girl sometimes, and as much as Martha is still out of touch with reality as I live it, I'm glad my level of fantasy, and my taste in magazines has shifted.

A Proper Breakfast

Shortly after I began my love affair with tea books and purchased the subject of my last review, A Proper Tea, I came across this week's book in a catalog called Jessica's Biscuit:  A Proper Breakfast.  [Apparently, Jessica's Biscuit, which was a cookbook only catalog and website, has just ceased existence...]

At the time, I thought and hoped this book would be only the second in a series, but I think this was the only other book that followed the same pattern.  It was never readily available here in the US, even before the era of Amazon.  My copy of the book came complete with a small card explaining that the design and concept of the book was based on A Proper Tea by Joanna Isles.  Clearly Alexandra Parsons and Evie Safarewicz followed the same ideas and designs of the previous book, even to the same degree that, as with the first book, the illustrations are more memorable than the recipes.

Breakfast is my favorite meal, closely followed by brunch.  I love breakfast pastries, and the idea of a casual meal where bunny slippers are de rigueur.  Breakfast has the full compliment of tasty foods and fancy/ridiculous equipage.  I look for any excuse to break out my toast rack!

A Proper Breakfast is a very limited look at breakfast in other cultures (mostly Western cultures) from the point of view of popular expectations, and not necessarily what folks in those places actually eat on a daily basis.  The New York breakfast features bagels and lox.  Brunch in New Orleans features jambalaya.  Breakfast in the Tropics is not about the Caribbean or South America, the way I expected it to be, but about Africa - the one non-Western chapter in the book.  It's clearly the whimsical British look at breakfast traditions.

The opening chapters focus on the breakfast beverages of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate.  I was so surprised to read the suggestion that jugs of coffee be prepared like tea:  put the grounds directly in the pot, pour in the boiling water, stir, and pour out over a strainer.  So odd.  Who does that??

The best part of the book are the illustrations, which are similar in style to those in A Proper Tea.  They feature drawn versions of actual china patterns and breakfast foods.  It was fun to try and guess what each chapter would be about from the drawing at the beginning.  My favorite is the New Orleans chapter with black and white china, iron scroll work curlicues and colorful masks and foods.

Overall, the content of the book is really the pictures.  The recipes are common, and available anywhere, but the pages are worth browsing through for tablescape ideas, or even for art's sake!

Okay, I admit that one of the calendars I want for 2015 is this Breakfast Calendar...