:eek:
You drink tea from paper cups? That’s positively barbaric. And here I thought a coffee shop was dodgy if they served it in a stainless steel teapot.
What’s more, the teabag will be Lipton’s at best, in most places. Which makes worrying about the “subtle flavors” kind of moot. And if you’re really unlucky, you’ll get something like United Food Services, which I’m convinced is made up not only of sweepings, but of oak leaf sweepings.
While i love a cup of high quality tea, i can live with Liptons. But the practice of placing a tea-bag alongside a cup of (often merely luke-warm) water is an abomination.
As for drinking tea from paper cups: it’s less that ideal, but sometimes i want a cup of tea to go, and the china cup just won’t stay on the saucer while i’m driving.
Riche doesn’t always mean rich.
No matter what the quality of the tea was at the time it was purchased by the restaurant, be assured that it’s been sitting on a shelf in the back of the pantry since the place opened. Never order tea in a US restaurant that has been open more than two years.
LOL!
Well I don’t; that’s why we only drink hot tea at home.
‘High tea’ as a phrase is very old-fashioned. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone refer to it since one occasion in the 1970s and even then I’d never heard of it before.
What, no second breakfast? Horrors!
What I was told as a young child when I questioned what “dinner” meant in such contexts, was that dinner was the main meal of the day, the one on which the person(s) cooking would devote the most effort. It could be in early afternoon, as in “The parson is coming after church for Sunday dinner” or in the evening. An evening dinner was preceded at noon by “lunch”, which if a full cooked meal was “luncheon”; an early dinner was followed by an evening “supper”. Others’ usage may vary, of course, but that’s Upstate New York 1950s usage.
Only on weekends. I do sometimes sneak in a muffin for elevenses, though.
I’ve always understood “dinner” to mean the main meal of the day regardless of time, as well. Most of the regional variation I’ve seen has just been in which meal the main meal is, not what that meal is called. That is, in the places (mostly rural) where the noon meal is usually the biggest, they refer to breakfast-dinner-supper, and in the places where the evening meal is biggest, it’s breakfast-lunch-dinner.
There’s a bit in one of the Asterix books, where Asterix asks his English cousin how much his tweed suit cost. The reply was “My taylor is rich.” I always thought that was a strange line but now I finally understand it.
Actually, plenty of people do. I’m one.
So is Terry Pratchett
*
- [p. 25/25] “‘How many times have you thrown a magic ring into the deepest depths of the ocean and then, when you get home and have a nice bit of turbot for your tea, there it is?’”
Nanny’s ring story is a well-known folk tale that goes back as least as far as Herodotus, but has also been used by e.g. Tolkien and Jack Vance.
More interesting is that at least one non-Brit over on alt.fan.pratchett had some trouble making sense of the implied connection between the concepts of ‘turbot’ and ‘tea’. What he did not realise was that ‘tea’ is the term the British tend to use for any meal taken between 4.30 and 7 pm, which may therefore include a nice, juicy turbot. *
But that quote calls it “tea”, not “high tea”, which is exactly what C R’s S P said.
I grew up (and still live) in Hampshire, southern England, and we always called our evening meal “tea”. You’d be out playing football in the street and your mum would call you in for tea.
For some reason I call it dinner now, though. I think it’s the influence of what everyone else called it when I moved away to university and lived in London for a time.
D’oh. Posting while tired, I misread what C R’s S P said as Nobody calls “high tea”, just “tea”. I missed the “it.”
Although I grew up saying “breakfast-dinner-supper,” dinner was not the main meal. Supper was. I lived on a farm, but that wasn’t our main income. My grandfather could make a living off our farm. My father couldn’t. My father worked at a factory from early morning to mid-afternoon. Sometimes he would then do work on our farm late in the afternoon. Sometimes he work at it on the weekends. Sometimes he would work on it on vacations from the factory. In any case, when I grew up, supper was the main meal. I don’t know, but it’s possible that when my father was growing up, dinner (i.e., at noontime) was the main meal.
I interchangeably refer to my evening meal as dinner or tea, and often in the same sentence. I think it comes from the culture clash of having working class parents and going to a ‘posh’ private school. Or maybe it’s being brought up in Birmingham but living in London.
Either way, I’d never call it supper, because that would make me sound like a nob.