Welcome to our annual Emilie Loring tea! I will be posting photos all day, so be sure to check back often to see how our community is enjoying the day.
If you have photos or stories to share, please send them to contact@pattibender.com, and I will post them quickly.
And here we go!
“I really wanted to do an outdoor picnic style tea inspired by the riverside tea in The Solitary Horseman, but in reality it ended up more like one of the simple teas from When Hearts are Light Again ( I recently re-read both). The weather unfortunately did not cooperate, so it had to be indoors. And as I couldn’t find my two tea cups we had to make do with iced tea in glasses and a lovely jelly roll with homemade strawberry jam.” ~ Heide
A bag of tea, two sandwiches, lumps of sugar, half a lemon and a tin cup with a handle which looked as if it had been in contact with many a fire. Evidently a solo afternoon tea had been on her program. Where Beauty Dwells
I had tea on the deck while choosing among some favorite Emilie Loring heroines. As I’m in Southern Illinois, not in New England, the heat wave made the outing rather brief. I thus packed my books for a day at the pool! ~ Peggy
I enjoyed a solo tea at my house. The Dundee Bars were scrumptious, with butter, almond, chocolate, and blackberry jam vying for attention in gooey, crunchy bites. (I refuse to look up their Weight Watcher points!)
I had fun trying three teas: Cape Shore Blueberry Tea, Darjeeling (my usual favorite), and Downton Abbey Tea (a present from my friend Lynn, spicy with clove, cinnamon, and allspice). I liked them all, but I favored the blueberry tea this afternoon. That may partly have been because I read Where Beauty Dwells for company, and that takes place in Blue Hill, Maine.
“I had my Emilie Loring Tea in the canoe out on the Little Bear River today. The beautifully steep Wellsville Mountains are in the background. I’m thoroughly enjoying re-reading High of Heart (Constance Trent and Peter Corey).” ~ Amanda
“While the tea brews I have time to decide what to read.”
You can’t go wrong, Melissa! Today, I’m in the mood for We Ride the Gale! What do the rest of you think?
Peggy stopped at Lana’s Tea House near Buffalo, New York. She remembered that in Where Beauty Dwells, the “southern blonde gold-digger” Patty Lee Lovel observes that “our hero” Mac Cameron prefers Lapsang Souchong tea and offers him a cup at her tea party on the loggia. Peggy continues:
“I always wanted to know what ‘Lapsang Souchong’ tea tasted like.
“The tea tastes smoky a different taste – probably chosen by Emilie – masculine??? In any case, both the World Wars had Russia as one of our allies, while today, it seems foreign to get excited about anything Russian. Lapsang Souchong is a Russian Caravan tea.
“The tea package announces Lapsang Souchong is a black tea – highly caffeinated tea – perhaps that’s why Mac Cameron drank it? So I had to find out all about it:
“The large tea leaves are smoked by a unique pine process to produce an amber cup with a mellow smoky flavor. It has a light body, with a smooth crisp character and a very prominent, heady aroma of a pine wood fire. Lapsang Souchong is generally consumed with sugar, milk and/or lemon.”
In the 1700s, it took half a year for the tea to travel by camel caravan from China, through Russia, to Europe, but the tea stayed in better condition that way than when carried by sea. The tea is now dried in the smoke of pine fires, but its more romantic, origin story is that the smoky taste was imparted by nightly campfires on those long, camel journeys.
“Who knew that Emilie’s writing would cause such curiosity and research??”
Peggy
Happy tea day, everyone!
The Emilie Loring Collection 