Tribute to English High Tea and Sri Lankan Teatime and Shorteats

British food has had a significant impact on everyday foods of Sri Lanka.This maybe why I have always been fascinated with British food. The Sri Lankan version of the British High Tea tradition is tea with short eats.My memories of short eats are from childhood birthday parties and when my parents took my brother and I for an occasional treat to Elephant House in Kandy town. I remember eating cutlets and rolls with tomato sauce at Elephant House and ice cream served with a wafer in an aluminium cup. At birthday parties we always ate patties, rolls, cutlets and sandwiches along with iced butter cake.It was always so delicious.

These childhood memories were the beginning of my fascination with English Teatime.After I moved to Los Angeles, I visited various tea houses where English high tea was served including Tudor House, Two a Tea, the Rose Garden Tea Room at Huntington Gardens and Chado Tea room.When in Sri Lanka the last time I visited, I had high tea at Mt.Lavinia Hotel.

This lead me to want to duplicate the flavors of those Sri Lankan birthday parties and the British tea time treats.I wanted to make those delicious sandwiches.I also wanted to make scones, which are not served in Sri Lanka but which I first tasted in Fiji where many Australian expatriates lived.I searched on the internet for recipes for sandwiches and scones.

There was always a fish sandwich along with beetroot and egg sandwiches at Sri Lankan birthday parties.I ended up making 3 varieties: egg sandwich, fish sandwich and cucumber sandwich.Cucumber sandwiches are not traditionally eaten in Sri Lanka but I wanted to include cucumber as they are synonymous with the English High tea tradition.

I came up with my own formula, that comes relatively close to what Sri Lankan sandwiches tasted like ,influenced by the various recipes I found on the internet.First, I made a paste for the fish and egg sandwiches consisting of mayonnaise, butter, ground mustard, black pepper, salt, diced onion and diced green chillis.To this base I added canned tuna for the fish sandwich and mashed hard boiled eggs for the egg sandwich.I used sandwich bread to make the sandwiches and cut off the edges of the sandwiches and cut each sandwich into 2 fingers.

The three links below influenced the final outcome of my fish and egg sandwiches with a Sri Lankan touch.

http://www.infolanka.com/recipes/mess5/88.html http://curryandcomfort.blogspot.com/2011/08/tea-sandwich-series-tuna-sandwiches.html http://curryandcomfort.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-sandwich-series-egg-salad.html

For the cucumber sandwich I used an English cucumber sliced into 1/8 inch slices and used 8 slices per two slices of buttered bread and sprinkled with a little salt and pepper before cutting into 2 fingers, once again trimming the edges.I did not peel my cucumbers although the recipe recommends that they be peeled.

This is the link to the  recipe I used for the cucumber sandwiches:

http://thepauperedchef.com/2009/08/part-two-of-my-cucumber-sandwich-revenge-tea-time.html

Pictured below are a plate of the sandwiches I made from left to right: Egg, Cucumber and Tuna (in front)
(Please excuse the crumbs on the plate :)) Please click on picture to enlarge

For the scones recipe, I really wanted to make Pumpkin Scones.Pumpkin scones which were made famous by Lady Flo Bjelke-Peterson who was a Senator and the wife of the former Governor of Australia's state of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson. I had gone to Australia in the mid eighties as a teenager to Brisbane, Queensland for higher studies and Flo's husband, Joh was the controversial governor of Queensland at the time.I had never actually tasted Pumpkin scones before, although I had eaten currant scones.I wanted to find a recipe that was low in sugar and fat and I was able to find one on the internet.I actually used 1cup of pumpkin instead of 3/4 cup.

This is the link to the  recipe I used:

http://australian.food.com/recipe/pumpkin-scones-18101

Below is a picture of the Pumpkin scones I made, which I served with jam and Smart Balance spread.Traditionally, they would be served with butter or clotted cream and jam.(Please click on picture to enlarge)

My Childhood in Sri Lanka in the Seventies

The Sirimavo Bandaranayake government imposed severe import restrictions during the early seventies in Sri Lanka. Thus, we had to forgo many items that people in the west took for granted. Amongst the goodies that my dad brought back from his visit to the US (where he went to finish off his PhD ) were wrigleys chewing gum, pony tail rings, plastic hair clips, a battery operated children's sewing machine, record player, a gold chain with a heart shape pink stone pendant and a lovely pink dress for me.

Looking back now it's interesting to remember the things that we had to go without during those days and sometimes we had to use food substitutes. There was a restrictions on small red onions, so we used the big bombay onions instead. Masoor dhal was in short supply so we used the bigger yellow lentils but they used to have weevils inside as vendors used to hoard a lot of supplies. I remember sometimes when biting into lentils if you got a bitter taste it meant that you had just bitten into a weevil! That wasn't as bad as the bakery bread, which was also baked from flour full of weevils ,worms and sometimes other insects. My brother and I used to take jam and butter/margarine sandwiches to school and it was no fun eating those sandwiches! School finished early I think it was around 1.30pm so we always came home and ate rice and curry for lunch.

I think my brother and I were lucky because our parents did not believe in spoiling us with cakes, soft drinks or biscuits. Our diet was a healthy rice and curry and bread. Cakes were only baked by my mother for birthdays and biscuits only served for guests. Maliban biscuits were the most widely available local brand of biscuit. The soft drink at the time was Elephant House and I remember one time my Mom bought us the one that was colored purple and we kept it in the fridge and drank it slowly. Short eats(savories) were only eaten if we happened to be shopping in Kandy town, then we'd have them at Elephant House along with tomato sauce. That was the only time we were required to use cutlery and it was rather awkward for me, as we normally ate at home with our fingers. Ice cream was a rare treat that we only had at Elephant House. A scoop of vanilla ice cream was presented in a silver bowl always with a wafer sticking out. There were also those booja packets that were available in the shops but our parents never bought them unless we went to see a movie. I think children nowadays are so spoilt and eat so much junk food, I am not at all sorry that these so called treats were a rarity during my own childhood. Chocolates were also a rare treat and I used to suck on a piece of chocolate until it melted away, so rare was it in our household. Due to sugar restrictions my mother decided to make date cake as a way to save on sugar. The date cake was very rich.At the time I did not particularly like it although as an adult my tastes have changed and I'm sure I'd appreciate it more now.

When I was in kindergarten at the Kandy Convent, I would have been around 6yrs old. What I remember is that they separated me from my brother and he went to a different class from me. I wished that we could be in the same class but I had no choice. There were two teachers in my kindy class a middle aged lady in Indian Sari and another younger lady dressed in Kandyan sari who was the assistant teacher. Myself and a few other kids were assigned to sit around the younger teacher. She was a very nice woman, I think she was a Catholic girl probably from Anuradhapura or some
other remote town.
Yours truly in the picture (bottom right) with
my kindergarten classmates at Kandy Convent in 1973. Click on the pic for a better view.

Everyday for lunch they used to deliver a delicious looking fish bun from the canteen for her lunch. I couldn't help watching her as she ate it and wondering what was inside the bun. She noticed me watching her eat the bun so one day she pinched off a small piece and gave it to me to eat! I remember another food incident, there was a little boy who was dressed in a silky pair of shorts and a matching silky shirt, one day at break time he opened a brown paper bag and took out two pieces of cake. One was chocolate cake with chocolate icing on top. The other was vanilla cake with white icing on top. My parents of course never sent cake for my lunch, so I watched how he eat it. He licked off the icing from both pieces of cake and put the cakes back in the bag. Even at that age I thought that was a waste of good cake!