Tea-Time Recipes National Trust Propertes England

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Description: "There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." So Henry James wrote in Portrait of a Lady, and few National Trust visitors would disagree. By sitting down to enjoy a cup of tea, they are perpetuating a ritual which has its origins in Britain in the seventeenth century, when the marriage of Charles II to the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, established tea drinking as part of social life. 

Legend has it that the National Trust's first catering enterprise consisted of a cup of tea and a bun served through the window of the gardener's cottage at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire; if this is true, the Trust's tea-rooms have come a long way since. Examples of tea's associations with National Trust properties are legion. Jane Pettigrew discovers curious and ornate tea wares from the Orient and from Europe, relates stories of bizarre tea parties, and finds that each afternoon at Lanhydrock in Cornwall a tea table is set with lace cloth, fine porcelain, silver tea knives and linen napkins -- just as tea tables have been set in Britain since the late nineteenth century. 

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Condition: Good condition.