A tea tray
There’s something about things served on trays. A tray is elevating.
I don’t particularly like airplane food, but I do like being delivered my impossibly small tray with its different little bowls and plates and packets of things organised into a game of Tetris. The unsophisticated joy of working my way through each of the little compartments of food, and making my own version of Tetris with the detritus, is a mind fuck: how does this under seasoned, overcooked food taste quite good?
When I went to Brussels last year, my sister took us to a small bar in a hotel lobby. We ordered two glasses of white wine and a beer. The wine was poured into a dinky little wine glass with a tall green stem, which came served on a paper doily lined silver tray with a small glass bowl of ready salted crisps. It quite possibly was cask wine, but is still one of my most memorable glasses of wine. Ever.
As a small child there was no greater pleasure than going to my grandparents’ branch of Robert Harris, collecting a brown plastic tray, and working way my way along the conveyor of sandwich cabinets and pie warmers and cake plates. Onto my tray - my own tray - I would put a ham or ham and egg sandwich on a white ceramic plate, a paper punnet of chips from the pie warmer, and a paper cup sloshed full of ice and Sprite. A lunch fit for a Small Greedy Girl. I can only but imagine what then would’ve happened: charging through the café with my tray like the uncoordinated bull in a china shop that I was (and am) with the (misguided) confidence of a lifelong Parisian waiter who can balance 71 plates all at once.
Sometimes on Saturday mornings when we lived in Wellington, if I was in a good mood, I’d walk up Vivian Street to Le Moulin, the little French bakery run by a Vietnamese couple that closed (to the immense disappointment of its regulars) and reopened again twice in the space of three years. That was a mind fuck too. I’d buy their very good beef curry puffs and a chocolate and custard filled brioche that was called a Pepito and a Danish pastry filled with a Wattie’s Black Doris plum. I’d go home, cut the Pepito and Danish in half, pop everything onto an annoying number of plates, pour two cups of coffee from my Moccamaster (god, how I miss thee), and put everything onto a beautiful handled wooden tray that Pete made and that I inherited from Dea. We’d have our baker’s shop feast in bed.
In Moneglia last Summer I always took our breakfast out onto the balcony on a tray: pieces of salty focaccia on separate plates, a little plastic pottle of fruit-flavoured yoghurt (I’d pick a different flavour each day at the grocer round the corner), a small bowl of whatever fruit I had to hand, sometimes two hard boiled eggs, always two cups of coffee (Nespresso, not Moccamaster, but we live). I’d put Phil’s bits and pieces in front of the seat he became accustomed to sitting in. I’d keep my bits and pieces on the tray and eat from it.
When I was in Brussels recently, my sister always served our nibbles - for with drinks - on a wooden tray. She’d put olives and paprika nuts and crisps into small bowls; different cheeses and pickles onto little plates. The tray was primarily there for the purpose of making it easier to transport multiple vessels to our outdoor table, though I noticed T used the tray for serving our salty snacks even on the nights when we ate nibbles and drank wine at her big kitchen table.
Of late, one of my favourite places to go for lunch in London is Diwana Bhel Poori House. On Friday, Saturday or Sunday you can go for the lunchtime buffet. You pick up a large stainless steel plate, which is more like a tray, and fill it with a rainbow of salads and pickles and chutneys and curries and dal and rice and fried things from the most beautifully laden tables. I like the way they nestle vases of fennel fronds between the bowls and platters of salad. My tray is always quite full; so full I feel embarrassed to go back to fill it up again, even though the rules dictate that you are allowed. Instead, I go and get a smaller stainless steel plate, which is definitely a plate and not a tray, and fill that with lychees and chunks of pineapple and gulab jamun from the dessert corner of the buffet. Sometimes I sneak one samosa or pakora onto my dessert plate.
After doing the dinner dishes tonight I made a pot of tea. Barry’s Tea, to be precise, now that I have a tea strainer and can use the big teapot that my sister bought me for my birthday without getting a cup full of tea leaves. As I was getting two mugs, I noticed the green wooden tray that we bought at the Arezzo Antiques Market sitting on top of the cupboard. I took it down, brushed the dust off, and proceeded to top it with the mugs, the teapot, a little silver dish that I rested the tea strainer in, and another little silver dish into which I popped two cream filled biscuits. The tray of tea is now sitting on our coffee table, and it looks rather lovely. Quite civilised. And it really is a good brew that I’ve made. It’s probably just the tray.
I will be a tea tray person from now on.