Victoria sponge often features in afternoon tea! Also cakes, scones (small), sometimes sandwiches, possibly mini vol-au-vents.
As you can imagine, afternoon tea no longer looms large in most people's everyday menu, but nowadays it is offered at many hotels, cafes and restaurants - some include champagne or sparking wine, which most definitely would
not have formed a part of the Victorian tea. The company that runs the cafes in our National Galleries and Signet Library here in Edinburgh does it - you can see it here:
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/visit/cafes/ and here:
http://www.thesignetlibrary.co.uk/colonnades/afternoon-tea/I think middle and upper class Victorians would always have had it (viz Downton), though goodness knows how they managed to eat a huge dinner a few hours later.
Even today it is quite usual to stop for a cup of tea mid-afternoon, though it will often be drunk at one's desk. Tea seems to be making a comeback amongst the hipsters of Edinburgh; there are now entire shops devoted to it, with ridiculously inflated prices to match (though of course when tea first arrived in England it was prohibitively expensive and the lady of the house kept the key to the tea caddy).
I don't know why it is so much more popular here than in mainland Europe (presumably something to do with our association with India?) - in hotels that I have stayed in in France, Spain, etc all that has been provided is a couple of Liptons teabags (awful - no-one would ever buy that stuff here) and usually no milk at all. In fact I think the custom of providing tea & coffee making facilities in hotel rooms is a peculiarly British thing - we stayed in some wonderful
chambres d'hote in France last summer but only one of them provided a kettle (and the owner was well travelled).
Even long after the Victorian era, afternoon tea is still mentioned in the novels of people like Barbara Pym, Angela Thirkell and DE Stevenson, who I think were writing in the first half of the 20th century. By Pym's last book (
Quartet in Autumn - the title says it all...), however, proper tea was a thing of the past - though maybe that was because by then she was focusing on rather sad, lonely people who were down on their financial luck, as opposed to the comfortable middle-class sisters of
Some Tame Gazelle or the affluent Wilmet in
A Glass of Blessings.When I was a student in the late 1970s we still invited one another round for tea sometimes, but I think even we knew that we were just pretending. Having said that, the University Library in Cambridge was still thronging with people - students, academics - at around 3.30pm every day, when everyone gladly left their work and met up for the tea room's fabulous (though not in the least smart) scones.
Am I right in thinking that in the southern states of the US, iced tea was a big thing? I imagine ladies sitting in those swinging seats on verandahs, sipping tea and exchanging the local gossip.
Rosemary
