Table Settings; Special Touches for Entertaining

Finally, the last of my Victoria Magazine books.  I think...

This week I read Table Settings, published in 2002 by the Editors of Victoria Magazine, but largely written by Mary Forsell, a Victoria editor who wrote other books about entertaining, flower arranging and berries, topics near and dear to my heart.

The back cover of the book summarizes the contents well.  This book is about collecting, selecting and presenting tableware including china, silver, glassware, and linens.

The book is divided into chapters which inconsistently focus on dining occasions, dining locations, or tableware themes.  The first chapter covers breakfast time, which is often overlooked as a separate entertaining occasion but is often a part of weekend visits and other overnight stays.  I love the idea of this chapter, and often look for excuses to use my toast rack, but this chapter, like much of the book and the previous Victoria books is a great illustration of their issues with picture captions and sources.  The picture below (poorly photographed by me) features this great set of teacups with leaves - maidenhair fern, or maybe parsley leaves, or something like that.  I love those cups.  I would love to have them, or at least take a closer look at them.  But the book neglects to name their manufacturer (only the name of the photographer - at least that's something), and I can't find them on the web.  I think the picture caption thing is about this book being a compilation of Victoria material.  The pictures were likely take for long-ago articles, and who remembers what exactly was included in each image.  I suppose it's for the best, given the over-crowded state of my china cabinet, but I would make room!!!  If you have any ideas about who manufactured this pattern, let me know!

The next chapter focuses on dining alfresco.  Apparently, according to Victoria, at least in 2002, you need the excuse of the great outdoors to shed the formality of entertaining.  Outdoor table settings should be casual, colorful, and use everyday items in new ways.  A blanket can be used as a tablecloth, a washtub as a champagne cooler, etc.  I do love the idea of not worrying about finding a tablecloth that's long enough, but instead purchasing fabric right off the bolt and leaving the edges raw (it's outdoors, so raw edges are also allowed).

The next chapters focus on floral motifs and whiteware as a staple of entertaining, and later chapters cover using tablewares as art and display pieces, and various occasions or events for parties.  The "history" chapter strikes a chord as it focuses on the nineteenth century fashion of table services with huge numbers of very specific pieces.  This chapter articulated the idea that Victorian-era entertaining was more about showing off your stuff and the prowess of your kitchen staff rather than about actually eating very much.  Your dinner may have had nine courses and umpteenth pieces of silverware, but you definitely needed teatime as an extra meal midday.  Like those in the nineteenth century, I also need pickle forks, compotes, celery vases, tomato spoons, and on, and on.

In all, Table Settings is a pretty book, with fine content, flimsy picture captions, and not enough pictures that illustrate the content in the text.  But now all I really want to do is catalogue, display and USE all of my tablewares!!!

Next Week:  Something not published by Victoria!!!

The Essential Tea Companion

This week's book brings us to the last of my Victoria Magazine tea books.  Victoria has since started publishing annual tea-themed magazines, but more on that some other time...

The Essential Tea Companion from 2009 essentially re-purposes much of the content from Charms, Pleasures and Art.  In this volume, there is no one author because it is a compilation and even says so.  I suspect Kim Waller is the main contributor because of her part in the previous volumes, but this is unclear and unstated in the book.  Many of the pictures are of settings familiar from the previous books, but they are different shots of the same setting from those that appeared previously.

In tone, this book is much the same as Pleasures and Art, but there are a few key differences:

-It is very clear that this book is about tea parties and tea things.  It's nice to finally have that out there, and have all of the extra bits gone.  There are no preemptive interviews, no pieces of random text just stuck in there.  Just parties and stuff.  Fine.
-The pictures have captions!!  The captions don't always tell you the name of the china pattern or the source of the thing, but they do relate the pictures to the text, which is a start.
-Recipes are back, and there are lots of them.

But still and all, the book is very much in line with the concept of Victoria Magazine and the idea that life is or can be a blissful fantasy.  For example, there is a section on the prevalence of the silver tea service and how its popularity declined after WWII (which is why you should seek them out at antique stores and vintage sales and snap them up!), but no practical advice on how to polish, clean, store, and preserve your silver tea things, or any of your other tea wares.  It's almost as if covering that topic would break the romantic spell of Victoria.  It's also a lost opportunity to segue into the joy of home organization, natural cleaning products, and, of course, butler's panties, but again, I do appreciate the clear focus on parties and stuff.  And if Victoria or anyone else published a book on butler's pantries, I would buy it for sure!

Next time, I have one last Victoria book to share with you:  Table Settings!

The Art of Taking Tea

This week's book review is a strong echo of last week's review of the Pleasures of Tea.  The Art of Taking Tea was published by the Editors of Victoria Magazine in 2002.  It is again written by Kim Waller (who is again uncredited on the cover).

In much the same way as Pleasures, Art is loosely organized around three themes, but within each section, veers off topic into subjects that are vaguely, but not exactly related.  Part one is sort of about the history of tea including the tea trade and the introduction to tea to the West.  It includes information about the harvesting and the preparation of tea leaves, and then suddenly jumps to a section on silver tea wares and the Victorian custom of having an "at home" day.

Part two is about going out to tea and features three locations in particular:  Tealuxe in Cambridge, MA,  the café at Takashimaya in NYC (now closed), and Laudrée in Paris, most known for its colorful macarons (Does anyone go to Tealuxe?  Will someone take me to Laudrée right now?).  There are sections on tea at an English country house and how to have an Asian aesthetic at teatime at home.

Part three is about different occasions for tea:  tea in bed, tea as a theme for an office party, tea picnics, tea and wedding celebrations, tea dances, etc. 

The book is pleasant, inoffensive, but reads like a magazine in terms of overall flow.  Somehow the title, "The Art of Taking Tea," is just one that sounds nice rather than what this book is clearly about.  The pictures are lovely, but not captioned (I do love that pink Jasperware on the cover).  The interviews are only in passing, and not long enough or in-depth enough to add.  Interesting differences to note in this book, as opposed to Charms and Pleasures:  there are no recipes, and by 2002, all of the businesses listed in the resources section have web addresses!

Next week:  one more Victoria book to go - The Essential Tea Companion

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...

A Proper Tea...

This week's book, A Proper Tea by Joanna Isles, is another early addition to my tea book collection.  It was published in the UK in 1987.  I bought it some time in the early 90s.

A Proper Tea is one of my favorite kinds of books about tea.  It opens with some basics about the history and the proper preparation of tea, like many tea books do, but the heart of the book are the chapters devoted to different types of tea occasion, the perfect tea for that occasion, and accompanying recipes.  Each chapter is illustrated by the author, using real china patterns as a basis for the watercolors.

Tea Outing

Two of my favorite teas, Darjeeling and Yunnan, are paired with A Proper Tea and Tea by the Fire.  Another appealing pairing is Keemun tea for a Black & White Tea. 

A Proper Tea

The most memorable chapter is called A Bizarre Tea, inspired by the 1920s tea and china sets designed by Clarice Cliff in bold shapes and colors.  The recipes in this chapter include orange-flavored sweets to echo the art deco designs.

Clarice Cliff's Bizarre Ware

The Black & White Tea chapter is an attempt to promote the tea party to a contemporary audience.  The recipes feature caviar-filled treats, all based around a sophisticated, minimalist color palette.  The author was writing at a time when tea had fallen in popularity compared to coffee and other beverages, even in the UK.  The author hoped that by showing a modern tea party example, she would convince readers that tea time and the tea party was not helplessly old-fashioned, but adaptable to current styles and habits, and well worth reviving.

Twenty-seven years later, tea and the tea party still survives.  Is teatime still a daily ritual in the UK?  It never was here in the US, which may or may not be related to the Boston Tea Party.  In my little piece of the world, having a tea party, going out to tea, or even a solo cup of tea at the end of the work day is still a moment of calm, a treasure in the middle of a hectic life.  I wonder if I would feel that way if it was just part of the daily pattern...

Next week:  A Proper Breakfast