Dining at Downton: Afternoon tea

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York City to work at a children's literary agency. I knew almost no one and quickly discovered that I am really not cut out for big city living. While I quietly raged against the masses of people crowding the sidewalks of Manhattan, I tried to carve out a space for myself in this city of millions. I reconnected with a few high school friends, and together we explored restaurants and museums and out-of-the-way shops. Still, there were days when homesickness for small-town Ohio would overwhelm me, and I'd need an afternoon pick-me-up.

That's how I discovered Tea & Sympathy, an adorable British tea shop in the heart of the West Village. On the recommendation of my mom's British colleague, I visited the shop one lonely August afternoon and snagged a tiny round table for myself. Wedged in between a table of chatting women and the front window, I ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a plate of scones with clotted cream and jam. The tea arrived steaming hot, accompanied by milk, sugar, and a little tea strainer. (This is where I learned how to pour tea that's been brewed with loose-leaf.) Balancing my book on my lap, I sipped tea and nibbled on light-as-air scones long into the afternoon. When I re-emerged into the heat of the city, I felt lighter, relieved of some of that loneliness.

Afternoon tea, it turns out, is good for what ails you.

The British knew this well. Once the concept of tea as a meal was firmly established in the late 19th century, it took on different meanings depending on your social class. The working class took tea as their final meal of the day, since they often couldn't afford a full meal with meat and vegetables. On the other hand, the extremely wealthy (like the Crawleys) took tea as an afternoon snack, dining on fancy cakes and dainties while they gossiped. As those of you who watch Downton Abbey know, this is the time for scheming, when the Crawley ladies plot out what suitors to cultivate and how to manipulate issues of inheritance in their favor. It's also the time for nursing broken hearts and talking discreetly about intense emotions. As I've discovered, there's nothing like a bracing cup of tea and delicate treats to make you feel better.

While we Americans often think of afternoon tea in conjunction with sweets, the Edwardians also took tea with savory treats like tiny sandwiches. French food was in vogue, so hors d'oeuvres like canapes were on the rise. This brings us to today's snack: canapes de maquereau.

Why yes, we are throwing around a lot of French today.

It's a simple recipe: thinly slice a piece of smoked mackerel, and bake in a dish greased with cayenne pepper and butter. Top little rounds of toast with the baked fish. It's a salty, spicy dish (perhaps spicier than the Crawleys might like), one that will make you drink gallons of tea. But after all, when you have matters of the heart to discuss, nothing else will do.


Canapes de Maquereau
(adapted from Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire)

4 oz piece of smoked mackerel
1 tbsp butter
1/8 - 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
4 - 5 slices light bread

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Combine the butter and cayenne pepper and grease the bottom of a baking dish with the mixture. Slice the mackerel into thin pieces and lay on the greased baking dish. Bake at 350 F for 10 minutes, or until the butter melts and the fish is warmed.

Meanwhile, toast the bread. Top immediately with the fish mixture once you remove it from the oven; be sure to sop up any leftover butter with the fish. Serve with tea.

Sardine sandwiches

Yep, you read that right.

As you may recall, I'm one of those weird folks who actually enjoy foods deemed disgusting by many Americans: anchovies and sardines, in particular. Anchovies don't just add a unique umami flavor to pasta sauces and Caesar dressing, they make a delicious topping for white pizza, too. Unfortunately, few people in my life agree. So it's always exciting to find someone else who enjoys salty, oily canned fish; it's like a special club made up of friends you'd never expect to know.

Like my freshman suitemate's grandmother.

My living situation freshman year of college was...well, interesting, as is the case with basically all college freshmen. My college arranges students in suites, which are made up of a few bedrooms (single or double) all connecting to a common living room. So instead of getting to know just your roommate really well, you also get to know four other suitemates pretty well, too. And since you don't have much of a say in who these suitemates are, you end up in one of three situations: becoming best friends; hating each other; or being surprised every day with unexpected stories and experiences.

Mine was definitely the latter, courtesy of my suitemate Charysse.

Charysse had a single, and she kept to herself for much of the first month of college. We all did, when we weren't sticking like glue to the few friendly people we found. (My roommate Daena and I pretty much went everywhere together.) But around October, something changed, and Charysse started spending more time with us in the common room, and we got to know each other real fast. Charysse posted her graded chemistry lab reports up on the walls, because she goaded her TA with ridiculous conclusions comparing the study of chemistry to the study of love. The TA responded with outraged comments, which made for excellent posters. Charysse also led us in afternoon singing sessions, which she taped on a little hand-held recorder. We discovered a shared love of Led Zeppelin and rocked out to Kashmir on quiet weeknights. It was one of those friendships that can only develop in college, when you're thrown together with people you wouldn't normally get to know. You discover how much you actually have in common with them.

Jacques Pepin Celebrates! (actual poster from PBS)

One of the most memorable aspects of that freshman year, aside from all of the above, was coming home to discover that Charysse had gotten another package from her grandmother. Her grandmother loved to send her all sorts of random gifts, which, while thoughtful, rarely had anything to do with anything. A typical package might include a creased PBS poster of Jacques Pepin (which went up on the walls, of course) and six can openers (one for each member of the suite). We had a lot of fun trying to decipher what these gifts meant.

But the strangest package was the one with the sardines. Her grandmother sent some big cans of sardines, along with a few other items that I can't recall. And after a long discussion of what this latest gift meant, Charysse opened up the cans and ate the sardines. I don't remember if I joined in--this was early on in my anchovy-sardine career, and I may not have even tried them by that point. But something about those little fishes nestled in their tin packet of oil appealed to my adventurous side. And I mentally added sardines to my list of approved foods.

It's a silly little story, one that makes me smile the way college stories do. But I always think of it whenever I'm dealing with sardines.

Unfortunately, The "Settlement" Cook Book's version is less than stellar. You mash up sardines and hard-boiled eggs into a kind of paste, which you then spread on sandwiches. It's a perfectly serviceable meal, but it lacks flavor. Perhaps the eggs cut the fishy flavor of the sardines. Honestly, when I'm eating sardines, I want the full experience. You're wrinkling your nose, I know, but it's true. Go big or go home, they say, and it's the same with sardines.

Just ask Charysse and her grandmother. They'll tell you.

What about you? Do you have any weird food preferences? I'd love to chat...


Sardine Sandwiches
(adapted from The "Settlement" Cook Book)

1 4.25 oz can of sardines in oil
2 hard-boiled eggs, shelled
1-2 tsp lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste
3-4 tsp olive oil

Rinse the sardines with fresh water and drain. Pick out the spine and other prominent bones from the fish. With a fork or potato masher, mash together the sardines and eggs in a small bowl. Add the lemon juice and salt and pepper, then add just enough olive oil to bring the mixture together into a paste. Serve on toasted bread with fresh greens.

A tale of two peanut butters

This weekend the weather turned. It's been hot and muggy all week, the air dense with rain. And now the heat has burned off and it actually feels like fall. Supposedly it won't last, but after Saturday, we'll take it.

Even though summer is my favorite season, there are loads of things I like about fall. The crisp leaves, the way the air feels fresh and brisk, cooking with apples and pumpkins, going to harvest festivals. I love getting ready for school (which is probably why I became a teacher), picking out new notebooks and pens and binders. That back-to-school trip to Office Max or Staples, where the shelves are full of notebooks and the air is crisp with possibility...sigh.

I'm a huge nerd.

This year things are quite different for me as a teacher, since I'm working part-time as a humanities teacher at a Montessori school. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot to get used to about this new set-up. Aside from a few bumps, it's been going smoothly, but I'm still trying to figure out the most important thing: lunch.

When do I eat it? Do I eat it in the classroom with the children? Do I wait until I go home? If I don't get out of the building until 12:30, and I don't get home until 1:15, will I be dying of hunger? What should I make? What's portable and easy to heat up when there's a line of children waiting to use the microwave?

As you can see, it's a topic fraught with anxiety.

At my previous school, teachers ate separately from students and had time to heat up their food and chat with each other. At this school, teachers eat in the classroom with their students and manage to down a few bites in between kids asking where the forks and knives are, if they can go outside and play because they finished their lunches in five minutes, etc. A very different experience. So far I've been sticking to salads, but I'm itching to try something new. Exotic sandwiches? Maybe soup?

Lo and behold, The "Settlement" Cook Book had just what I needed: a whole chapter on sandwiches for luncheon. You'd typically make these recipes for an afternoon picnic or an informal luncheon with your closest lady friends. I flipped through the chapter, looking for something that sounded promising. And then I found it: "Peanut paste for sandwiches."

The 1903 equivalent of peanut butter! A classic school lunch! Even the recipe was easy: after crushing half a cup of peanuts (with your modern food processor), you mix in a cup of boiling water, some cornstarch, and let the whole mixture thicken for 8 minutes, after which you season it with poultry spices. Aside from the poultry spices, it seemed pretty straightforward.

Little did I know. I'm not sure what kind of peanuts Mrs. Kander used when she wrote the recipe, but those crushed peanuts did not thicken into a paste until I'd added a tablespoon of cornstarch and boiled the heck out of it for half an hour. So by the time I sat down to lunch, my expectations weren't too high. I decided to compare the peanut paste with Jif Natural peanut butter from our pantry, rounding out the whole meal with some lingonberry jam (thank you, Ikea) and carrots. Like I said, a classic school lunch. With a twist.

And the twist is this: peanut paste tastes pretty much like you crushed up some peanuts and mixed them with water. It's less appetizing than whole shelled peanuts, and the poultry spices make it more savory than sweet. I found myself nibbling on my Jif peanut butter and jelly sandwich in between every bite of the peanut paste one. While this recipe isn't one of my major failures, it's a disappointment.

I'll stick with Jif.