High Tea vs Afternoon Tea: What Is High Tea, What Is Afternoon Tea, and Where Cream Tea Fits In

How afternoon tea began

Tea was fashionable in Britain by the late 17th century, but for a long time it was a drink, not a meal. The meal is usually credited to Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford. The story goes that in the 1840s she suffered from a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoon, in the long stretch between lunch and the evening meal, and asked for a tray of tea, bread and butter and cake to be brought to her room.

Her full name was Anna Maria Russell, and she lived from 1783 to 1857. She was a confidante of Queen Victoria, and her tea of cakes and sandwiches “began at around four o’clock,” which is why four is still the classic hour. As our story Women of tea points out, she was not the first to pour tea in the afternoon. Serving tea then was already “very much part of a woman’s domain” in parts of Europe. Her rank simply put her in the right position to set the trend in England, and from there in its colonies and the Americas.

She soon invited friends to join her, and the habit moved from her rooms to drawing rooms across the country. Queen Victoria took to it too, and was once the Duchess’s guest. The Victoria sponge, a sponge cake sliced in half and filled with jam, cream or both, is named in her honor.

Because the working classes were at work at four o’clock, the custom stayed largely with the upper classes. That, our 2017 story suggests, is probably where much of the etiquette of formal tea came from, along with the growing importance of owning fine teaware.

Afternoon tea kept growing grander. By the 1920s it had acquired silver teaware, linens, hors d’oeuvres and sometimes a jazz band: in the words of our 2015 story, “It became less about tea and more about the pageantry.” Its admirers took it seriously. One of our early stories quotes Henry James: “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hours dedicated to the ritual known as afternoon tea.” As the story adds, he said hours, not minutes.

Afternoon tea was served in the sitting room or drawing room, on low tables beside comfortable chairs, so it was sometimes called “low tea.” That small detail is the key to the whole naming muddle, as you will see below.

Afternoon tea did not stay with the aristocracy. Peter Keen, a British writer and longtime contributor to our blog, wrote for us in 2016 about the afternoon teas of his youth in the 1960s and 1970s: low-key gatherings, by invitation only, around the host’s best china, mostly attended by women while the men were at work. The hostess brought out her one porcelain tea set and her favorite tea cozy, in a well-kept living room. There were biscuits, Swiss rolls and sweets, and the tea was Assam. A Darjeeling was kept for very special guests. At 16, as the youngest at the table, he was expected to “be seen but not heard,” and his helpings of chocolate digestive biscuits were limited to two.

Before the 19th century, most British families ate two main meals a day, a heavy breakfast and supper. In the 19th century, workers who traveled long distances to their jobs got into the habit of eating a substantial meal at about six in the evening. It was fresh, simple, homemade food: cold meat, pies, tarts, salads and sandwiches, which is why it was also called “meat tea.”

The tea itself was not always the point. Our 2017 story describes Britons of all classes coming home from work to a meal called “tea,” with “a hot dish, meat, bread and possibly cake, with or without tea the beverage.”

In much of Britain, people still say “tea” when they mean their evening meal. The names of meals have long puzzled visitors: in the countryside, “dinner” was usually eaten at midday and “supper” in the evening. As our 2016 story on English food and tea puts it, “dinner might be called tea, too.” The words simply marked when you ate the one big meal of the day.

Why is it called “high” tea?

The usual explanation is the furniture. High tea was eaten sitting up at the high dining table, while afternoon tea was taken on low tables in the sitting room. So “high” never meant grand or upper class; if anything, it meant the opposite.

Tea in everyday Britain was built on working-class habits, not aristocratic ones. The Lyons Corner Houses, the big London tea rooms, were a haven of tea “perhaps even more central to everyday English life than Starbucks has been in the US,” with fresh interiors and waitress service in what was really a fast-food café: “They were built on the working class traditions of tea, not the aristocratic ones. Tea really did bind the culture together.”

Food at a working tea was meant to fill you up. Our 2016 story lists the chocolate digestive for dunking, Swiss rolls, the breakfast fry-up and the bacon sarnie, eaten with “a cup of strong black tea, one that is definitely not served in a delicate porcelain tea set.”

Peter Keen’s working Britain started early. The day began at dawn with a cup of strong Ceylon black tea, a routine he joined at the age of eight. The tea came mostly from India, Ceylon and Kenya, and it was always whole leaf, in black blends from the big everyday brands. A Darjeeling was a luxury in working-class homes, saved for special guests or a special occasion.

Tea breaks are woven into the British day in other ways too. Even cricket stops for tea: a day of Test cricket has a fine rhythm to it, with two hours of play, lunch, and two more hours of cricket before a tea break, followed by another couple of hours.

The real difference is hunger. For the upper classes of the 18th and 19th centuries, tea time was formal, scheduled and built around invited guests and the family circle. The food was a light extra, “rather like the peanuts you get served on the side in a bar.”

A working family’s tea had to do a day’s job. The same story describes the bacon sarnie as built on different principles: “It is meant to be filling. It is a slab.” That is why the two meals call for different pots. A delicate Darjeeling suits a cucumber sandwich; a strong, malty Assam stands up to pies, cheese and milk.

The hour mattered as well. Afternoon tea was “a much more social affair,” held while working people were still at work. High tea was the meal they came home to.

The confusion runs right through our own archive. Our 2016 story Cucumber Sandwiches and Bacon Sarnies: English Food and Tea Cultures calls the cucumber sandwich “the emblem of high tea,” meaning the refined hotel version, and notes you won’t find a bacon sarnie “in a four-star hotel offering afternoon tea at a five-star price.” Peter Keen remembered the “high teas at the Savoy or the Ritz where scones, cucumber and salmon sandwiches would be served.”

Other stories of ours do the same. One on teacups says, “High tea ceremonies invariably include saucers. Tea drinking as everyday routine doesn’t need them.” Another, on tea in France, praises “the Gallic style of high tea elegance” and notes that one of London’s grandest hotels serves only teas from a French retailer.

Strictly, every one of them was describing afternoon tea. Neither is wrong as everyday speech, but if you are booking, it helps to know which one you will get.

For the wider story of how tea became a British habit, see The history of tea; for how other countries take theirs, see Tea cultures of the world.

Chota hazri, the early morning tea

Chota hazri was also translated as early morning tea or bed tea. A food historian quoted in our 2015 story, Cecilia Leong-Salobir, describes it as the first meal of the day for Anglo-Indians, taken between five-thirty and six and consisting of tea, boiled or poached eggs, toast and fruit. It was peculiar to the Bengal Presidency and was called “early tea” in Madras.

The old glossary Hobson-Jobson quotes Edward Waring’s The Tropical Resident at Home: “There is one small meal… it is that commonly known in India by the Hindustani name of chota-haziri, and in our English colonies as ‘Early Tea.’” Our writer, who went to boarding school in Kurseong in the 1970s, had never heard the term there. So he asked Charles Tresham, an Anglo-Burmese alumnus of the school whose family had lived in Calcutta. “In school we used it to mean ‘small porridge’,” Tresham told him. “At home it was ‘small breakfast’.”

Tea in the hill stations

In the hill stations, tea in the grand old hotels became part of local life. In Tea at the Ritz, our writer Sangeetha Shinde remembers the Ritz Hotel in Coonoor, in the Nilgiris, and cups of tea in a dining hall with a bank of windows over the rose gardens. The hotel was run by Vittal and Vasantha Iyanna, who had left a tea plantation job to be near their daughters’ school. As a teenager she sat at the far left table with the best view, and poured half a bowl of sugar into her golden cup.

She also had a standing summer date in Coonoor for tea at 4 pm on Thursdays with Erach Avari, a Parsi gentleman in a red tie and tweed jacket. They made the tea together, opened a packet of Marie biscuits and read to each other in his library, as she tells in Parsi Tea Parties for Two. For the planters, the evening tea and talk happened at the club: “the Coonoor Club is the planter’s primary watering hole in Coonoor and has been since 1885.”

Cream tea belongs to the farmhouse and tea room tradition, especially in Devon and Cornwall in southwest England, where the draw is “scones, strawberry jam and clotted Devon cream.”

Clotted cream itself is old farm produce. Our 2016 story calls it “peasant farmer produce” with the great merit of not curdling, and dates its first reference to 997 CE, before the Norman conquest. It was “not part of the high tea tradition” but “very much the upper end of the farmhouse one,” which places it in the farmhouse kitchen rather than at the formal hotel tea.

The great cream tea argument is about order. In Devon, the cream goes on the scone first and the jam on top; in Cornwall, it is jam first, then cream. Either way, the scone should be warm.

The farmhouse tea traveled, too. In Patagonia in Argentina, Welsh tea houses still compete to serve bara brith, a “speckled” cake bread, with black tea.

Our own picks run from a Margaret’s Hope second flush, Peter Keen’s choice, to a Halmari Assam for the bacon sarnie, with milk, lemon and sugar on the side.

Our 2015 story names the three essentials: the right tea, the right food and the right table. The full guide covers the menu, the cucumber sandwich, the table, the manners, what to wear and how to brew each tea.