Scottish High Tea
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Scottish high tea in its old-fashioned or traditional sense can be elusive to track down - but is still offered in a few hotels and restaurants. It is a kind of afternoon tea bulked with a simply cooked hot dish, perhaps fish or steak pie. Basically it's the refined-carbohydrate Olympics of Scottish food and is served from late afternoon into the early evening. In a way you can treat it as an unfussy early dinner. And it's unlikely after you've eaten a Scottish high tea, you'd actually want dinner! (I blame the sticky cakes for that.)
Scottish High Tea, dinner, lunch, supper - it's all very confusing
Ask any Scot what their evening meal is called and you will get a variety of answers. As an ordinary sort of chap, who grew up long ago, my evening meal was my 'tea' which was served at 'tea-time'. So, personally, I get Scottish high tea as a concept. However, in my parents-in-law's household, in Edinburgh, they have 'supper', not tea, as their evening meal. In my childhood, supper was an extra and late-night snack.
Dinner, for me, was a mid-day meal - the usage surviving in UK-wide phrases such as school 'dinner-ladies' and 'dinner-money' - and certainly not an evening meal. And here's a final oddity about meal nomenclature: in Scotland, fish and chips or anything else and chips bought from a chip shop, is often referred to as a 'fish supper' or a 'white pudding supper' - no matter the time of day it is consumed. Enough, already…….
I don't think I often heard the word 'lunch' until I went to university; at about the same time that dinner was transferring itself - for us upwardly mobile (?) young folk - from being a term that described the mid-day to a word meaning an evening meal in which some effort had been made. (I expect also it was a class thing.)
Where did Scottish high tea come from?
And why 'tea'?
Back to the topic in hand - the tea part was originally introduced in Scotland by Mary of Modena (wife of King James VII - II of England). The men-folk, in particular, needed some sustenance to go along with this new-fangled tea making ritual, hence afternoon tea and, eventually, high tea.
Did you say 'afternoon tea'?
Yes, and here's the important difference between the two (I reckon). The sometimes hard-to-find Scottish high tea is a total carb-fest involving a cooked course (or more) plus the home-bakes. Afternoon tea is high-tea-lite. Actually, not that light, as it's just as carb-heavy but doesn't involve fish or meat cooking. Instead, at its very best, as demonstrated by, say, Edinburgh's top hotels, it delivers posh sandwiches, lovely baking and a nice cup of tea or other herbal infusion. And as long as you don't overdo it, you might still have room for a meal in the evening. (Feel free to call it what you like - dinner, supper or whatever….)
Both afternoon and high tea seems to be an indulgence designed to allow the Scots baker to show off their baking skills. Follow this link for a scone recipe from Johanna's granny. Or here you'll find a selection of recipes from Scotland.
Real Scottish food
I asked my mum-in-law for her memories of Scottish high tea as a child. Her granny and grandad were tenant farmers on a farm now completely covered by Edinburgh's urban sprawl. At Duddingston, it overlooked Portobello and the Firth of Forth. This is what she sent - so vivid, so evocative of Scottish food, or post-war Scottish high tea, that I reproduce it here with minimal editing. (Coos, of course, are how we Scots say cows, amongst ourselves…)
Granny Brown's Scottish High Tea
Granny Brown's High Tea ... the spread well remembered on arrival from Arisaig for our summer hols in Portobello ... we usually arrived about 5 pm-ish ... having changed trains at Cowlairs! ...
The long kitchen table ... green sort of shiny surface ... was set with plates of girdle scones (we called these 'cake-scones' because they were SO GOOD!!), pancakes, white bread ... butter in separate dish ... not spread on the bread (an English habit!!)
Granny's homemade raspberry or strawberry and sometimes melon & ginger jam in jam dishes (NOT pots!!) ... a homemade seed cake or a coconut cake (though coconut cake was often served as a pudding for dinner with a pot of her raspberry or strawberry jam poured over it ... YUM!!)
A dish of tomatoes ... (from Lanark!) ... and the hot dish would either be baked fish (with an egg sauce) or macaroni or cauliflower cheese ... sometimes there was cold ham, tongue or pork pie ... but not very often... then room for an apple pie or tart and often a plate of her shortbread, with tea to drink ... or for we kids ... milk ... from the coos of course. (An everyday high tea might be bacon & eggs too!) ...
Later on ... once we kids were in bed ... Grandpa Brown came up to our bedroom (it looked out over the Forth to Inchkeith) ... a glass of milk and digestive biscuits ... always digestive!!
Dinner was ALWAYS a good soup ... Granny would boil a 'fowl' or a piece of mutton ... then it would be Irish stew or chicken and boiled potatoes ... she would also boil ham so than meant lentil soup ... mince and dough balls was another favourite ... then pudding ...this could also be rice pud or semolina ... but always liberally served with JAM!! .. never cream or custard ... top-of-the bottle maybe ... Grandpa liked this on his porridge ... another treat was tomatoes cut in half and sprinkled with caster sugar ... and also a slice of buttered bread sprinkled with caster sugar ...
A variation was the Scottish high tea produced by Auntie Minnie ... Granny's sister who lived in Lesmahagow ... she always had potted hough (ugh) and ox tongue (yum) ... but the rest was almost identical ... though she never ate with us ...she just sat in the corner and told us to eat up!!
Scones still are an essential part of Scottish high tea. Follow that link to see how a Scottish farmer's wife's baking beguiled German nobility from Balmoral Castle. Yes, really.
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