"Crisis or no, nothing should interfere with tea!" — Reginald Denny in Around the World in Eighty Days
Etiquette always seems to be associated with weddings and tea parties more than anything — yes, even more than formal dinners. Since January turns out to be National Hot Tea Month*, what could be more Perfectly Proper than to look at that deceptively versatile occasion, afternoon tea.
Tea can be Extremely Formal or Carelessly Casual. Let’s face it, one of the great pleasures of Friendship is to sit down at the kitchen table with a dear friend and a pot of tea for a Good Long Visit. But there’s also nothing like a Perfectly Proper tea for just a few people in the front parlor or the dining room, with cookies, cakes, china cups, and Considered Conversation. If you’re the hostess, you could wear a tea gown — but caftans are decidedly unisex**.
A Perfectly Proper tea service includes a teapot, a teakettle for boiling water, a sugar bowl, cream pitcher, and a slops bowl. You will also need a little plate for lemon slices, and Etiquetteer uses old china egg cups for artificial sweetener packets. The slops bowl is to pour out anything with errant tea leaves in it, or cold dregs before getting a fresh hot cup.
Emily Post says that any and all water involved in making tea has to be boiling. “The least amount of water not actually bubbling as it is poured over tea leaves turns the flavor to hay! (A fact that not one hotel in a thousand takes note of!)”*** A well-stocked pantry will include a teakettle designed to sit in a stand over a spirit lamp, like this one at the Metropolitan Museum. Mrs. Post warns against lighting the spirit lamp until the tea tray is completely in place on its table, to avoid setting the maid on fire as she brings it in. This seems Perfectly Proper.
But just what on earth are you supposed to do if, like Etiquetteer, you simply have no such thing as a spirit lamp . . . or a maid? First, keep the guest list small — six or less — and second, as soon as the kettle on the stove has been emptied, refill and begin boiling more water immediately for eventual refills. (Etiquetteer expects to hear from readers in England about their own procedures, England being so very identified with tea.)
The typical tea hour has always been 4:00 PM, but we don’t often think about when it ends. Would you believe an afternoon tea could go as late as 7:00? That’s so late it eclipses the cocktail hour, which usually begins at 5:00!**** Why on earth can’t we combine these things? Actually . . . we already can. And that’s not a new thing. The New American Etiquette of 1941 said that “If men are present, cocktails and champagne are often passed by servants who bring them from the kitchen were they were mixed and poured.”***** Dorothy Draper in her madcap book Entertaining Is Fun! suggests having a bottle of rum on the tea table in case anyone wants “the extra flourish of a teaspoonful in their cup.”****** Mrs. Draper — she really is quite insane, but Etiquetteer just loves her — even suggests serving tea at a cocktail party, which seems excessive.
We are so used to the image of tea being poured by a lady on a sofa in a drawing room that we forget that tea may also be served with Perfect Propriety in the dining room. Nicholas Fairford shows us how to set a dining table for four for an elegant tea (with champagne) in this video. To Etiquetteer, “dining room tea” implies heartier fare, a meal rather than a snack — for instance, a Welsh rarebit. In Entertaining in Washington*******, Lucy Moorhead describes an aprés-ski tea offered by Anne Taylor in Vail including mugs of hot tomato soup, savory sandwiches, and a charcuterie board among all the usual cakes and cookies. “Tea in the Taylor style,” she says “would be a fine wrap-up for any afternoon, and relatively easy and inexpensive. And different from the inevitable cocktail party, with its hors d’oeuvres and the expense of the drinks.”
However you take your tea, Etiquetteer wishes you a Perfectly Proper and Piping Hot Cup.
*Etiquetteer just loves how the internet comes up with these holidays! But then you knew that already.
**Etiquetteer has written about tea gowns and caftans before.
***Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, by Emily Post, 1950 edition, page 138. Just to be clear, those exclamation points are Mrs. Post’s, so she really means business when she says the water must be boiling!
****Just to be clear, that exclamation point is Etiquetteer’s, and Etiquetteer certainly likes the cocktail hour to begin at 5:00 PM sharp!
*****The New American Etiquette, by Lily Haxworth Wallace, page 514. Really, we’ve moved beyond those sort of gender roles in this century, and if the ladies want a kick in their tea, or instead of their tea, Etiquetteer has no quibble with that.
******Entertaining Is Fun! by that madcap Dorothy Draper, 1941, page 17.
*******1978, pages 120-121. This oddity in Etiquetteer’s library is essentially a valentine by the author to other Washington hostesses of the era with loving descriptions of their clothes, homes, and parties.