Tea Fare

The tea table remains a strong tradition in the Lowcountry, if only in training young ladies in comportment and etiquette. As late as 1934, when the Charleston City Directory listed only eight hotels in downtown Charleston, there were as many “Tea Rooms.” Recipes for sugar cookies, gingerbread, and old plantation favorites such as wigs, jumbles, and marvels are passed down through the generations like the family silver. The recipes have changed little in Charleston’s three-hundred-year history. Bill Neal, describing one such recipe in his book on southern baking, commented, “Recipes for the Queen of Puddings are remarkably consistent all over the South. Even the proportions are constant.” The recipe he gives for the meringue-topped tea cake is identical to those I have seen in several manuscript receipt books in the private collections of several old Charleston families.