High Tea
Dinner is, for most English speakers, the main meal of the day. When the word was first used (in the 12th century) it referred to a midday meal, but it did not remain so for long. By the early 16th century it had become the first meal of the day, what we would call breakfast. No doubt those 16th century diners had their own reasons for this but it makes perfect sense etymologically as the verb to dine comes from the Late Latin disjejunare, “to breakfast” via the Old French disner. The Latin word disjejunare, incidentally, is quite literally “break fast”, being dis (“undo”) + jejunare (“to fast”) and also gave the French word déjeuner “breakfast”*. Obviously, dinner could not get any earlier than breakfast and after the 16th century it drifted through the day, being served later and later until, during the Victorian era, high society sat down to dinner at 10 p.m. Having one’s main meal of the day at such a late hour meant that many tummies were growling by late afternoon. To avoid that unpleasant hollow feeling, a new meal was invented. It was just a light snack, basically a few cakes and pastries served with the expensive new status symbol, tea. Consequently, the meal was called “tea”.
Many U.S. tea-shops offer something called high tea – usually a fancy affair with varietal teas, crustless cucumber sandwiches and dainty pastries, and a high price. It is our experience that these tea-shops invariably think they are providing an opportunity to sample an English tradition. They are not. This is not to say that the English don’t treat themselves to fine teas, crumpets and scones – far from it. But when they do they don’t call it high tea. In England high tea is a distinctly working-class expression which is used in the North of England to mean “dinner” and is synonymous with meat tea – tea with which meat is served. High tea is the main, cooked meal of the day, served in the early evening. Thus, fish and chips would qualify as high tea whether or not a pot of tea appears on the table. We would like to introduce Americans to the term cream tea, which is what the British call tea served with crumpets, muffins, scones, jam and clotted cream, though the earliest recorded instance of this term comes from only 1964, at least so far!
But what about all those crumpets, muffins and scones? A crumpet is a round, flat bread with many holes on its upper surface. The word crumpet first appears in the 14th century in the expression a crompid cake. Crompid here means “curled up” (just like cruller, by the way) which suggests that the original crompids were somewhat different from our crumpets. In the Midlands and West of England you might hear crumpets called pikelets. This is one of the very few instances of the English language borrowing a word from Welsh. The original is bara pyglyd (Welsh for “pitchy bread”, presumably from its color).
*Jejunare also gave us jejunum, the “fasting” portion of the gut, so named as digested material does not remain there. Jejune comes from the Latin verb, also, and originally had the meaning, in English, of “without food, fasting, hungry” (early 17th c.), and then “undernourished” (mid-17th c.), but there was also “unsatisfying, poor, barren” (early 17th c.), and then “puerile, childish” (19th c.; this meaning is thought to derive from the misconception that jejune is related to French jeune “young”).
