Cream Tea or Afternoon Tea?

Scope. A cream tea is one course: scones, strawberry jam, clotted cream, tea. Nothing else belongs to it, and adding things does not make it a better cream tea, it makes it a different meal. An afternoon tea is three courses eaten in order — savoury sandwiches first, then the scones with their jam and cream, then small cakes and pastries — which is why it arrives on a stand and takes an hour rather than twenty minutes.

The names get swapped because hotels sell both and the signage rarely helps. The test is the sandwich: if there is no sandwich, you are having a cream tea.

Bottom to top, savoury to sweet, and the order is the whole structure rather than decoration. The bottom tier carries finger sandwiches with the crusts off — cucumber, smoked salmon, egg, coronation chicken are the four that will not surprise anybody. The middle tier carries the scones, warm, with the jam and cream served beside rather than already on them. The top tier carries the small cakes and pastries, which is the course that has changed most in the last twenty years and where almost all the choice now lives.

Eat upwards from the bottom. A stand worked through top first leaves you eating a cucumber sandwich after a macaron, which is exactly as bad as it sounds.

Devon puts cream first, Cornwall puts jam first, and both of them mean it. The Cornish order has the practical argument: jam spread on a warm scone sits still, and clotted cream spooned on top of it holds its shape, while cream spread first turns greasy under the knife and the jam slides. The Devon order has the older claim and the better mouthful, because the first thing the tongue meets is cream.

What nobody in either county does is pre-assemble. The scone is split, the jam and the cream are on the table, and each half is dressed as it is eaten — a scone built in advance goes soggy within minutes, which is the one part of this argument with an answer everybody agrees on.

The top tier, and that is said plainly rather than stretched. Scones, clotted cream and finger sandwiches are not made here — a scone is at its best within an hour of the oven, which is the opposite of an order collected the day before. What is made is everything on the sweet tier: macarons, cupcakes, small cakes, meringues and chocolate-dipped strawberries, all to order and all able to sit on a table for an afternoon without wilting.

The practical version is to buy or bake the scones on the morning and order the sweet tier ahead, which is how most of the afternoon teas supplied from this kitchen actually work. The afternoon tea cakes page lists what comes in what and at what price, and the cupcake boxes are in the table below.