UCI Illuminations, an arts and culture initiative established by Chancellor Howard Gillman, hosted a workshop recreating Jane Austen’s tea table on Feb. 10. The event was led by UCI English professor Dr. Jayne Lewis and English Ph.D. candidates Rachel Hoffer and Tara Leederman.
Lewis began the event by expressing her enthusiasm about Austen, an 18th-century English novelist best known for works such as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma.” Lewis then went on to express the importance of the tea table in Austen’s time.
“[Austen] used food to create a place in time for interactions between [the] sexes and between women. Tea was a female entrepreneurship. Tea plays a central role in modernizing women,” Lewis said.
She also discussed the origins of tea, noting that products — including tea tables — were “proliferating and being manufactured” during the 18th century. Lewis explained that tea tables indicated “modernity” and “refinement.”
Although tea houses served as an important source of female employment and a place for women to form their own communities, both tea and sugar “remained at the forefront” of the consumer revolution, which Hoffer described in the next portion of the event.
“We can study these two shockingly compatible items to see the way that economic, political and social factors transformed the African peoples and redesigned the British [tea] table to be a global one,” Hoffer said.
Even after the abolition of the slave trade, Hoffer explained that mercantile shops revealed the “obsessive need for sugar in daily life” and societal capacity for mass consumption.
She also discussed Shennong, an ancient Chinese emperor who was the first to discover the healing properties of tea leaves in regard to fatigue and disease.
“From that moment on, tea was trending,” Hoffer said.
Leederman, along with UCI Culinary Education Director Chef Jessica Van Roo, led the final portion of the event from the Anteater Recreation Center (ARC).
“Today, we think of tea as an afternoon ritual. In [Austen’s] era, lunch did not exist as a formal [meal],” Leederman said. “In [Austen’s] letters, [taking] tea was almost synonymous with having a visitor.”
Leederman and Van Roo showed participants how to make several meals, such as apple pie, cheese toast and pound cake. The dishes were available at the ARC Test Kitchen for participants to pick up, and the recipes can be found here.
Details about future UCI Illuminations events can be found on their website.
Chrissy Park is a Campus News Intern for the winter 2022 quarter. She can be reached at chrip10@uci.edu.