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Happy (belated) National Tea Day

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Yesterday was National Tea Day, and it of course got me looking at period tea resources.

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Still Life: Tea Set, ca. 1781–83, painting by Jean-Étienne Liotard

One of the things I found was a small pamphlet from 1785 called The Tea Purchaser’s Guide; or the Lady and Gentleman’s Tea Table and Useful Companion in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas (seriously, they loved long titles in the eighteenth century). It was written by one G. Kearsley of No. 46, Fleet Street, formally of the East India company’s Service “particularly in the Tea Department” (price one shilling).

It has sections on types of tea, judging tea quality, and the making to tea, all of which is great fodder for scenes in books where you need someone to be doing something nonconsequential while events unfold. So while the hero might expound upon snuff, the heroine (or indeed the hero, as men like tea, too!) can talk about tea, or have a calamity where the housekeeper has purchased adulterated tea, or talk about the blending of tea (of which he also gives advice).

I found his opinions about black verses green tea interesting as well. Black tea, he maintains, is injurious to those with coughs, asthma, or other issues with their lungs. In particular, he believes bohea (the lowest quality black tea) will particularly add to your suffering if drunk while ill with any such issues. Green tea on the other hand he says is “of great disadvantage to shattered constitutions, and those that are worn down by long and continued fever.”

What I find most interesting though is his lumping tea in with drugs and warning people not to consume too much of it.

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So happy tea drinking! Is there any tidbit of tea history you’d like to share? Please let us know what your favorite obscure tea fact is in the comments. Or just talk about your favorite kind. Mine is Numi’s Basil Mint Pu-Erh, which they have  sadly discontinued. I went a little nutty when they did and bought 20 (100 tea bag) cases. It will be a sad, sad day at my house when those bags are gone…

An Old Fashioned Christmas

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Happy December, Risky readers!  It’s been a busy month around here, with family visits and some lovely concerts (like Elena, there are aspects of Christmas that always make me feel a bit melancholy, but music is one of my favorite things about the season).  I have also had a flurry of new releases.  The latest is the 4th in my Elizabethan Mystery series, Murder at Whitehall (which takes place, of course, at Christmastime 1560).

So, how did the Elizabethans celebrate Christmas?

MurderWhitehallCoverOne thing I learned as I researched Murder at Whitehall is that the Elizabethans really, really knew how to party at the holidays! The Christmas season (Christmastide) ran 12 days, from December 24 (Christmas Eve) to January 6 (Twelfth Day), and each day was filled with feasting, gift-giving (it was a huge status thing at Court to see what gift the Queen gave you, and to seek favor by what you gave her), pageants, masquerades, dancing, a St. Stephen’s Day fox-hunt, and lots of general silliness. (One of the games was called Snapdragon, and involved a bowl of raisins covered in brandy and set alight. The players had to snatch the raisins from the flames and eat them without being burned. I think the brandy was heavily imbibed before this games as well, and I can guarantee this won’t be something we’re trying at my house this year!)

Later in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, she mostly kept Christmas at Greenwich, or sometimes at Hampton Court or Nonsuch Palace, but in the year my story is set, 1559, she spent the holiday at Whitehall in London. Elizabeth had only been queen for a year, so hers was a young Court full of high spirits. This was also one of the coldest winters in memory, so there would have been a lot of sledding and ice skating . It was fun to imagine this scene, and put my characters, Kate and her friends (including the real-life Lady Catherine Grey and her suitor Lord Hertford) into the action!

Even though there were no Christmas trees or stockings hung by the fire, I was surprised to find we would recognize many of the traditional decorations of the time. Anything that was still green in December would be used–holly, ivy, yew, bay. The Yule log was lit on Christmas Eve using a bit of last year’s log saved for the purpose. It was brought in by the men of the household, decorated with wreaths and ribbons, and set ablaze so everyone could gather around and tell tales of Christmases past.  Music, as it is now, was one of the big mood-setters of the season, and since Kate is the queen’s favorite musician I listened to many CDs of period music and imagined what she might play every day.

ElizabethIFood was also just as big a part of the holiday as it is now! Roast meats were favorites (pork, beef, chicken, fricaseed, cooked in broths, roasted, baked into pies), along with stewed vegetables and fine whit manchet bread with fresh butter and cheese. Elizabeth was a light eater, especially compared with her father, but she was a great lover of sweets. These could include candied flowers, hard candies in syrup (called suckets, eaten with special sucket spoons), Portugese figs, Spanish oranges, tarts, gingerbread, and figgy pudding. The feast often ended with a spectacular piece of sugar art called (incongrously) subtleties. In 1564, this was a recreation of Whitehall itself in candy, complete with a sugar Thames. (At least they could work off the feasting in skating and sledding…)

A couple fun reads on Christmas in this period are Maria Hubert’s “Christmas in Shakespeare’s England” and Hugh Douglas’s “A Right Royal Christmas,” as well as Alison Sim’s Food and Feast in Tudor England and Liza Picard’s “Elizabeth’s London.”  Be sure and visit my website,http://amandacarmack.com, for more Behind the Scenes history on Kate and her world, and a few Christmas traditions and recipes.  (Anyone going to try and cook the roasted peacock??)  If you’d like to give Murder at Whitehall a read, or see an excerpt, you can find it right here….

BlusetockingXmasCoverAnd And–if you are more of a Regency fan (I told you I had a flurry of new things out!), I have a little Christmas novella, The Bluestocking’s Christmas Wish!  If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of time for deep reading this time of year, and I’ve always found a Regency Christmas novella fills the slot nicely.

What are some of your favorite holiday reads???

Christmas Rant and Some Music

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Long time visitors to the Riskies know I have a complicated relationship with Christmas. I detest the whole commercial aspect and I also despise the idea that the season magically fixes things. However, I embrace the season in my own way—which is to accept the darkness as well as the light.

Each year, I think of people who are lonely, and of the various wars, large and small, raging through families and countries. Right now it feels as if the whole world is bleeding, and it seems that every day brings more heartbreak.

I know some people like to look away, to lose themselves in a blaze of Christmas lights, of shopping, even of obsessing about “not being ready” for Christmas. (What does “ready” really mean?)

My own way of coping is to allow the sadness in as well as the joy. Music is one of the ways I can stay in touch with both.

This year I found another version of the Coventry Carol, arranged by Ola Gjeilo, performed by the CORO Vocal Artists. Its haunting melody helps me find that stillness where I can feel the heartbreak and then let it lead me toward whatever healing action I can take for myself and others.

On the more joyful side and in the spirit of the Regency, here’s a version of the Gloucester Wassail and the Holly and the Ivy by the Waverley Consort, with assorted interesting Georgian and Regency imagery. The Gloucester Wassail was first published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928, but it believed to date back to the Middle Ages, so it could definitely have been part of a Regency Christmas. An early mention of The Holly and the Ivy is in a book dated 1823, and the lyrics are reprinted in an 1861 collection, A Garland of Christmas Carols, where it is stated that it was found in “an old broadside, printed a century and a half since” (around 1711), so this is another carol that our Regency characters might have sung.

Here’s the refrain from “The Gloucester Wassail”:

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee.

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to visit some of my posts from past years about traditional Christmas music that hasn’t been used to sell cars, watches, or anything else:

Holiday Music, Traditional and Reinvented

Antidote for Carol of the Bells

Carols and Winners

What are your favorite carols?

Elena

Dancing Dukes, Demons, Sinclairs and Holidays

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Limited Time Sale

Cover of Dancing in The Duke's Arms, an anthology. A couple is dancing outside. He gazes fondly at her, she is perhaps a little shy. They are outside because it is summer and who doesn't want to dance outside with handsome duke?

Dancing Dukes!

For a limited time — even more limited by the time you read this, Dancing in the Duke’s Arms is on sale for $0.99 (or the currency equivalent, less VAT). So, if you don’t have this yet, now would be the time to check out four original stories, including An Unsuitable Duchess, by Yours Truly. . . with Dukes. <grin>

Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Google Play | Kobo | All Romance

Other News

I have been frantically trying to finish My Demon Warlord, Book 7 in the My Immmortals Series. It’s in final stages and I’m hoping to get it to the copy-editor next week sometime. I hope.

That means I have had my head in demons and witches and not historicals except for when Risky Rose Lerner forced me to buy the soundtrack for Hamilton and OMG. Just… so so so wonderful. I want to fly to NY and see it. OK, so Rose didn’t actually force me but I blame her anyway.

Interestingly, in the shower this morning I ended up washing my hair and plotting Book 3 in the Sinclair Sisters Series (for fans, that’s Emily and Devon’s story). It’s my next project and it is a historical.

Holiday Wishes

I believe my next post will be in 2016 so I wish all of you the very happiest of holidays and a wonderful New Year.

John Carr Architect

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I’ll bet if I say “Robert Adam” most readers and writers of Regency romance will know that he was a famous architect who greatly influenced architecture, interior design, and furniture design of the times–mostly Georgian times, but I imagine my Regency  characters in houses designed by Adam all the time.

On my England trip last year, though, I learned of another architect of the same period, even more prolific than Adam–John Carr.

John Carr designed Basildon Park, one of the houses we visited on the Duke of Wellington Tour and one I blogged about here shortly after. He, too, was a neoclassicist like Adam.
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If you saw this, would you guess it was by Robert Adam?
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It’s an interior of Basildon Park by John Carr.

Carr was born in Yorkshire and decided to remain there rather than settle in London, thinking there was plenty of wealth in the area to support his business. He lived into his eighties and produced an incredible number of projects.

Tabley House is another house designed by John Carr similar to Basildon Park.
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One characteristic of both these houses is that you have to go up stairs to reach the front entrance which is on the first floor, not the ground floor.  I thought that was rather grand when we visited Basildon Park.

In my current work in progress, Genna’s story in the Scandalous Summerfields series, I used Basildon Park as my model for Summerfield House. It was especially helpful to find floor plans online.
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There was one famous house that both John Carr and Robert Adam designed–Harewood House near Leeds.
Harewood_House

Carr designed the building and Robert Adam, the interiors. Adam also slightly altered Carr’s exterior, including internal courtyards.

Who is up for visiting all these houses? Don’t you sometimes wish we really had a Transporter like in Star Trek?