Tag: “afternoon tea”
Colonel Saab: London’s India-Inspired Salute to Afternoon Tea
There are few culinary customs more quintessentially British than afternoon tea. Typically consisting of a selection of bite-sized savoury sandwiches, scones, sweets, and bottomless brews (of the leafy variety…as opposed to pints), this gastronomic indulgence dates back nearly 200 years.
In the 1840s, the Duchess of Bedford, one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, got tired of waiting–on her evening meal, that is. To assuage the “sinking feeling” she often got around 5 PM, the Duchess requested some tea, bread, butter, and cake. “What a terrible idea” said no one ever, and thus, the tradition was born.
There have been many clever 21st Century takes on this historic repast, from fashionis-teas to fur-tea-ve dalliances with felines. One especially apt incarnation, given the rise of the U.K.’s first prime minister of Indian descent, Rishi Sunak, is afternoon tea at Colonel Saab.
London’s Creative Twists on Afternoon Tea
From “Prêt-à-Portea” repasts offering catwalk-worthy cakes to, well, cakes with cats, London is reinventing this traditional culinary indulgence. Here’s a taste of what’s brewing around the city.
Courtesy Dukes London
Paul A Young’s chocolate tea promises to be a sweet success at London’s Grosvenor House
“Everything on the menu, I absolutely adore,” Young insists.
There are few things in this world which chocolate can not improve, and those which it can not are probably not worth eating. Pigs’ feet, for example, would not be any more edible dipped in chocolate. Ditto for chicken livers, ox tongue, and jellied moose nose. (Yes, apparently, that IS a “thing.”)
While cucumbers would never have made the list of my top five “Fear Factor” foods, I would have thought them equally impervious to the embellishments of any incarnation of the cocoa bean. But then again, I’m not visionary chocolatier Paul A Young, who has been lauded five years running by the Academy of Chocolate. (Sorry to disappoint, but no, you can’t earn a degree at the academy by eating bonbons. I checked).
Young’s chocolate and cucumber sandwiches were among a host of delicious revelations revealed today at a preview tasting of Young’s new “Chocolate Inspired Afternoon Tea,” which officially launches 14 April at Grosvenor House, a JW Marriott Hotel on London’s Park Lane.
Chocolate and Cucumber Sandwich. The proof is in the pudding.