A cup of twee

The famed Oregon Shakespeare Festival is based in the little town of Ashland, just eight miles to the south of us. OSF is the 57.14-stone gorilla of Rogue Valley tourism, drawing in many thousands of theater-loving visitors who stay in Ashland's bed and breakfast inns and eat in Ashland's numerous fine restaurants (OSF's total annual economic impact for Oregon in 2008: $168 million).

Shakespeare is the original reason for our theater season, and even though these days more than half the festival's productions are authored by diverse playwrights and include many new and multicultural works, Ashland does tend toward an English theme. Heraldic festival banners line the main street, and there is enough faux Tudor architecture to please a faerie queen. Downtown awnings sport business names like Puck's Doughnuts, Shakespeare Books, The Crown Jewel, Bloomsbury Books, Black Sheep British Pub (do check that place out if you're in town), Unicorn Gifts, and even Renaissance Chiropractic. Not to mention all those B&Bs: A Cowslip's Belle, A Midsummer's Dream, Albion, Tudor House, Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Arden Forest, Romeo Inn, Shrew's House, Stratford Inn, Bard's Inn, Winchester Inn, Windsor Inn, and Under the Greenwood Tree.

So when an old friend emailed me last spring about starting a reading and study group dedicated to Shakespeare's plays, it was an easy choice. What else can you do when you live in a hotbed of anglophilism?

For our first meeting, Sue invited us to bring our families to her house for dinner and a viewing of the new Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet - two of us had drama-major children who were home for the summer, which made for a lively and informed discussion.

For our regular summer meetings, though, it seemed the best time for just the three of us to get together was going to be late afternoons. Teatime! (what a book geek, I can't look at that word without hearing Teh-a-tim-ay in my head.)

Anyway, teatime. When my sister and I hitchhiked through Britain in 1981, we (like a lot of first-time visitors) fell in love with afternoon tea. We made it a point to sample tea rooms all over the island. So civilized! We marveled at the clotted cream, sugar tongs, and doilies in Devonshire, Cambridge, and Harrod's in London - and we swore we'd have tea every day at 4:00 when we got back to California.

Like the old gods, such pledges don't transfer easily to the New World. I did find a good recipe for scones, and I've often made them for breakfast with company and to bring to Unitarian coffee hour, but I never did get around to hosting a tea party... until now.

Shakespeare certainly never indulged in a formal afternoon tea - in fact, he would not have drunk tea at all, since it wasn't popular in England until the late 1600s, long after he died. And tea as a light late-afternoon meal wasn't invented until the Duchess of Bedford desired a way to relieve "that sinking feeling" when dinner was still hours away, in the mid-1800s.

Be that as it may, in Sara's garden for our second Shakespeare meeting, a table loaded with tea sandwiches, scones with strawberry jam and lemon curd, and a delicious flourless chocolate cake accompanied our serious examination of Henry IV part 1.

This month it was my turn (for Twelfth Night), and we agreed on tea again. I polished the antique silver candy dish, cut some roses from the garden, and brought out my grandmother's china. Then I made egg salad sandwiches on buttered bread (with the crusts cut off, of course); banana bread; and a summer pudding (for recipe link see this post) with creme fraiche.

Sara arrived with a basket of her poppyseed muffins (made with white flour grown and milled right here in Medford, at Dunbar Farms! An important piece of information for our upcoming Eat Local week - more on that another day); Sue brought a tray of adorable little openface cucumber sandwiches. Add plenty of Earl Grey with all the accompaniments (milk, sugar, lemon) - and we did eventually get around to talking about the play.

How very civilized indeed. But that Duchess of Bedford must have had some metabolism. For my part, I think I'm going to skip dinner.

Here's my grandmother's recipe for banana bread; I've been making it since I was 8 years old and it's still my favorite. Shakespeare didn't any more eat banana bread than he drank Darjeeling, but I hear both are popular choices at tea time in England these days.

Banana Bread

2 C flour

1 t baking soda

1/2 C butter (or margarine, if you must)

1 C sugar

2 large eggs

2 average size overripe bananas, mashed

1/3 c buttermilk, or 1/3 C milk curdled by adding 1 t lemon juice or white vinegar

3/4 C chopped walnuts (optional, but I always add them)

Cream butter and sugar well; blend in eggs. Mix in mashed bananas.

In a separate bowl, stir baking soda into flour.

Add dry ingredients and buttermilk to creamed mixture, in halves, alternately. Do not overmix.

Bake in a greased loaf pan at 350 degrees for 60 to 70 minutes.