As with many British fashions, afternoon tea became popular on the subcontinent, too. In Victorian India, tea was drunk as in Britain, with milk and sugar, though that sweetener might have been jaggery,2 a dark brown sugar made by evaporating the sap of palm trees. Some Brits enjoyed tea Mughal style, with spices, and The Raj at the Table offers a rather baroque recipe that includes palm starch (sago), almonds, cardamom, rosewater or dried rosebuds, milk, sugar, and “just sufficient tea leaf.”3
In gardens of hill stations during the summer social season, and in the sunny winter down on the plains, tea was served along with sweets—tiffin cake, dholi buns, Bombay golden cake, and gymkhana cake, which included plums and currants. Baking in British India was not without its challenges, even for experienced cooks. High-quality flour was hard to come by and butter difficult to keep fresh. Yeast was perhaps the trickiest ingredient to obtain, so cooks often prepared homemade versions from cookbooks “using ingredients as diverse as potatoes, hops, bananas, barley, toddy (palm sap) and a fruit flower known as mowha.”4 Even if a cook could whisk up all of the ingredients, ovens were primitive and formed a final obstacle to pulling off a decent cake.
Beforehand, the lady would most likely have checked her well-thumbed copy of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. The fourth edition, published in 1898 at the height of the Raj, contained forty-three chapters that instructed on every element of housekeeping and colonial life on the subcontinent, from getting a piano to the Himalayas for the summer to throwing a perfect garden party. “Cakes and bonbons suitable for tennis parties are legion, and, as a rule the one thing to be observed in selecting them is to avoid stickiness or surprises,” advised coauthors Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner. “It is not pleasant to find the first bite of a firm looking cake result in a dribble of liqueur or cream down your best dress.”5
For afternoon tea, the two ladies recommended serving warm slices of Ferozepore cake, named for the ancient town in the Punjab that under the British housed one of the largest military garrisons on the subcontinent. To the standard quartet of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, the recipe adds almonds and pistachios steeped in cream and, to tart it up, lime, which they exotically called “green citron.”
To be sure, if the hostess had consulted Mmes. Steel and Gardiner for her menu, she would have been firmly discouraged from serving anything beyond cakes and scones to accompany the tea. “In England, the fashion of having various kinds of sandwiches at afternoon tea has of late gained ground but as it means a necessary disregard of dinner, it is not to be encouraged by any one who sets up for being a gourmet.”6
The Mesdames did, however, yield—even if slightly—to fashion and offered a handful “of the latest” sandwiches, albeit “given in the proper place,” at the end of the book. (The penultimate chapter, added only “by request,” contains eight “native dishes” that the authors warned “are inordinately greasy and sweet.”)7 The limited selection included an eternal standby, egg sandwiches. But little else. “Almost anything can be made into sandwiches, so it is unnecessary to give more recipes,” the book drily noted.8
Lovely sandwiches can be found at afternoon tea in the Elgin Hotel. Built as the summer palace of the maharaja of Cooch Behar, the Elgin has a snug interior bedecked with etchings and lithographs, period teak furniture from Burma, oak floor paneling, plush red sofas with ample throw pillows, and fireplaces that crackle in the winter. In the well-lit drawing room that runs across the ground-floor front of the stout, white building, the Elgin’s waiters—clad not in frilly lace but turbaned, regimental uniforms—serve afternoon tea on the heavy, polished wood side tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Among the monogrammed cups and saucers and silverware covered in a gossamer of spidery patina, waiters set down a stacked tea tray (known in Edwardian days as a curate), with three hoops to hold plates of delicacies and a loop handle on top to carry it.
While the Windamere might prepare moister scones and clotted cream that can suspend a spoon upright, the Elgin serves just-fried pakoras (fritters) made of onions, vegetables, or boiled eggs to accompany their selection of sweets and savories, and, along with a long list of fine, single-estate Darjeeling teas—including Margaret’s Hope, Balasun, and Puttabong (Tukvar)—a sublime masala chai that’s aromatic and perfectly spiced.
“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” begins Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady.9 Sitting by the fire in Daisy’s Music Room on a drizzly day, or by the large windows of the front lounge at the Elgin with tea and pakoras when the mists clear for a moment to shed a quick glimpse of the ethereal Kanchenjunga hovering just above Darjeeling, it is hard to disagree.
For British in India, though, liquor, as much as tea, defined the Raj experience, especially in the popular imagination. “Of course drink is what keeps the machine going. We should all go mad and kill one another in a week if it weren’t for that,” proclaimed Flory the timber merchant in Orwell’s Burmese Days. “Booze as the cement of empire.”10 A battery of servants took care of most tasks, and the British often had little to do in the evening but whine about the heat and drink. Measuring out pegs of whisky and generously diluting them down with soda or water became a ritual. So did enjoying a gin cocktail to be served out on the verandah for a sundowner. Or earlier on weekends. “The hour or two before Sunday tiffin [lunch],” wrote Jennifer Brennan in her Anglo-Indian cookbook-cum-memoir, “was the time for several pristine gimlets or pink gins.”11
The gimlet was synonymous with British India. Four parts dry gin to one part Rose’s lime juice shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass. Limy sweet and refreshing in the heat, they go down easy. The Windamere still shakes the stiffest in town in a pickling ratio of six to one. At the Elgin, the barman adds a squeeze of fresh lime. Little else has changed.
But tea planters considered pink gin their drink. Just two ingredients that play off one another: gin, preferably Plymouth gin, which is a touch sweet, and Angostura bitters. The latter was developed in 1824 as a medicinal elixir to cure soldiers’ stomach ailments by a German doctor, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a Prussian army veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who fled to South America, where he was appointed surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s liberation forces. Originally called Amargo Aromatico (Spanish for “aromatic bitter”), the wily blend of spices, herbs, roots, and berries eventually took the name of the Venezuelan town where Siegert lived. It helped assuage seasickness in sailors and rouse the appetite of those living in unfamiliar, tummy-troubling lands. The gin was meant to disguise the unpalatable, acrid taste of the saucy, brown concoction, but in reality the bitters help cover the searing taste of cheap, local gin.