Vintage Tea Party Book Review

Here's a charming little book that has already given me a very pleasant evening nestled in a wingback armchair, deriving visceral pleasure from the photos of tea roses, embroidered linen and tiered china cake plates, and imaginative pleasure reading recipes and picturing myself hosting amiable acquaintances at tea parties that star scones, crumpets, Eccles cakes and delightful little sandwiches.

Just about to be released, Vintage Tea Party by Carolyn Caldicott (Frances Lincoln Limited, 2012), is not strictly a cookbook nor by any means a scholarly look at tea traditions, but it does contain about 60 recipes and some chatty teatime history: how the Earl of Sandwich is said to have created the eponymous portable snack; how Anna, Duchess of Bedford, is reputed to have instituted the custom of afternoon tea in 1840; some disambiguation in regard to various types of tea (High Tea, Low Tea, Cream Tea, Afternoon Tea), and so on.

In fact, the experience of reading it is something like flipping through a particularly engaging Martha Stewart Living article that goes on for 125 pages... if Martha Stewart was utterly English. It opens at a sharp canter with the fullblown assumption that everyone considers the hosting of tea parties to be an essential pursuit rather than an occasional frivolous pleasure; the first few pages offer advice on picking up the essentials (china, linens, the requisite tea strainer and so on) at "a summer fête", "car boot and jumble sales" or in "the high street".

Despite her down-to-earth injunction that one should never waste money on extravagant tea things if one can pick up bargains at junk shops, Caldicott does place herself squarely in the U camp when she admits she's on the "milk in first" side of the longstanding divide.

The recipes include some jams, some tea-based drinks (both alcoholic and non-) and some simple sandwiches, along with a few pertinent instructions, like the correct pricking of sloes for gin. I find the baking recipes more exciting. Caldicott isn't a stickler: she advocates the purchase of ready-made puff pastry and sponge cakes to streamline certain recipes. I'm keen to try her dependable-looking from-scratch recipe for Coffee and Walnut Cake with an espresso-flavoured buttercream icing, or her Ginger Brandy Snaps with Cardamom Cream: crispy rolled tubes of ginger-sugar filled with cardamom-scented, whipped double cream. I'd also like to learn how to make my own crumpets and English muffins.

A very minor quibble is that the gorgeous photos by Chris Caldicott are not captioned, which is not a problem when they show how a given recipe is meant to turn out, but annoying when they depict a lovely but unidentifiable baked loaf, or a jigsaw puzzle-worthy assemblage of pastel houses rising above the seawall of an enticing but anonymous English seaside town. Bognor Regis perhaps?* I want to know so I can flee there and retire to a life of foraging and smallholding as enacted in the TV universe of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – with lots and lots of tea parties.

Quibble notwithstanding, priced at about $15 in North America, Vintage Tea Party packs a lot of imaginative fun into a very pretty pink-and-grey package. I know I'll enjoy leafing through it repeatedly just for enjoyment, and – who knows? – I may even host some teas. I just need to get past one obstacle: unfortunately for me, I don't really like tea!

*While I was writing this piece at a café,  a woman working at an adjoining table asked to look at the book, opened it at once to this picture and asked "Oooh, where is this?"