An English Afternoon Tea

Since it is my mother's birthday, we decided to make an English afternoon tea, which she has suggested every now and then as an idea for dinner, but which I'd been dodging due to a frustrating experience with scone-baking.

First of all, however, Ge. and I went on a leisurely stroll to Tempelhofer Feld. It was a stifling atmosphere when we emerged from the cool apartment and stairwell, and I thought that it might have been wise to wear sunscreen, since it was around 1 o'clock and "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." But there were leisurely fields of clouds, too; as the Bard noted, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd." Besides there was a breeze.

Then, at the invitation of Mama, I went to the bookshop to pick up my Farsi-German dictionary. In the front of the book it was helpfully that written Farsi consists of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as four more; so I was pleased to find that it looked familiar and also interested that the letter names (shin, for instance) are sometimes like Hebrew ones. Then Mama and I talked outside, with little glasses of mallow tea and a saucerful of pretzels and trail mix.

After that came the grand journey to Edeka for the groceries.

***

The grand repast:

Platter, smoked salmon, gouda, cucumber sandwiches, radish sandwiches

Canadian wild sockeye salmon in rolls, with capers and horseradish on the side and eaten with dark bread; gouda in slices to be eaten with the same; cucumber sandwiches closed and radish sandwiches open-faced.

Ramekin of radishes

Glass dish of sliced cucumber

Scones

with

Lemon curd

Clotted cream

or

Orange marmalade

(which is made in England and which we, er, 'sourced' in the chain grocery store)

or

other

Orange pekoe

or

Assam tea

Red currants

Chocolate-marshmallow kisses

After Eight

Vanilla ice cream

Popsicles

Bilberry compôte

***

I made the cucumber sandwiches, as usual, by toasting white bread so that it would be firm on the outside and soft on the inside; cutting the bread lengthwise with a large bread knife so it is half as thick; buttering the insides of the toast carefully so that it protects the bread from sogginess; sprinkling salt and pepper on the two halves; placing thinly sliced cucumber between the halves; today, cutting the toast into four triangles.

For the radish sandwiches, I didn't cut the toast but left it thick, then butter and salt and pepper, then the sliced radishes. Since this household is fond of having liberal amounts of butter with radishes, I put a tiny dollop of butter on top of some of the sandwiches.


I found a scone recipe on the internet and made it from scratch. It only required flour, baking powder, butter, salt, and milk, and it turned out beautifully. When we put the lemon curd and clotted cream on it, it was wonderful and a marriage of flavours and so on — which I wasn't expecting. The lemon curd we made using Dan Lepard's recipe from the Manchester Guardian (July 3, 2010). I took normal-sized eggs instead of the specified large eggs, and the zest of only two lemons, and 25ish ml of water to dilute the lemon juice, so it was pourable rather than jellyfied and it carried a pleasing, subtle and natural flavour.

As for the clotted cream, I had decided not to take the biological risks of scalding milk and leaving it to form clumps; the idea of mixing butter with cream and a pinch of salt to create a scone cream spread didn't appeal to me either. So we were to replace it with plain and simple whipped cream.

The problem is that the cream was out on the table on a warm day for a while; as it was being beaten, it bypassed the whipping cream state entirely in favour of clumping together like scrambled eggs with little pools of whitish watery milk around it. The person who was mixing it (name withheld to protect the innocent) was in despair. But after taste-tests and a referral to Papa (the highest legal authority, as it were, in the household), we decided that it had not 'gone off' but was indeed consumable. Given its appearance I decided to call it 'clotted cream' after all. As it is, it looked like clouds once the lemon curd was poured over it.

We have a set of rose-and-white Wedgwood and a set of Gmunden tableware, so we mostly used those today. I was thinking of changing the tablecloth to a particularly festive one, too, but it looked clean. (c: