Civilised // Pitchshifter

Will decided that it was time for my long-awaited Yumchaa reveiw, and we went for lunch yesterday.

We headed to the new Camden shop which is completely unnoticable unless you know where you're going.
We had a look at the range of teas and tried to order. There was only one woman serving. It was lunch-time. In Camden. It took a while, to say the least. None of the food was labelled, so she had to run off what the sandwiches were, despite there not being much choice. I don't want to dwell on the sandwiches, as thats not really my interest, but they were toasted beyond belief. And took forever. Mine went in first and came out last. I had to swap with Jonny as my teeth wouldn't have coped.
Anyway, we eventually got our tea in nice white pots with accompanying strainers and we found a seat.


The actual shop is beautiful. It's all mismatched furniture and rustic looking cottagey kitchen tables, paisley wallpaper, brick walls and a beautiful light feature with hundreds of different lamps. There are lots of tables but still plenty of space to move around.
It aims for cosy, welcoming tea shop. It fails. It's got no actual atmosphere. It's too quiet. The cakes are displayed on a counter top in cheap baking trays.
It attracts trendy businessy type people, it's more laptop friendly than come and slump for half an hour and enjoy tea. It's more come and look like you care about tea while doing work.
I know that Yumchaa have quite a large student customer base. Well, I assume this as they have deals aimed at getting students in to work, which is very nice.. but.. it makes it feel more like Starbucks.
It's trendy. Aimed at yummy mummies and art students and metrosexual business men.
Which is fine. I have no problem with any of those stereotypes. I lie, clearly.
But anyway, it's just not for me. My ideal tea shop is sofas and books and friendly relaxed service.

Let's move on to the important part of a tea shop, the tea!
The whole business is based on bastardised tea. They have good policies, loose leaf, tea pot, fair trade, good quality, but then they take this fantastic tea and add stuff. Dried fruit, flowers, spices, caramel, nuts and chocolate.
And it's not even stuff that compliments or enhances the natural flavour of the tea. It drowns it out. I think it destroys it.
If you want to drink something that tastes like dried flowers then just take some dried flowers and add boiling water. Please? Don't bring good tea into it.


They do sell the lovely tea unbastardised, I will add. And I will happily drink this. They have the tea leaves in little cups for smelling when you order so you can make an informed decision on what tea to have.
If you're lucky they will make it clear that you don't have to have fruity flowery spicy nutty chocolatey tea, but this varies from shop to shop in my experience.

And now for the cakes. There were about seven varieties to choose from. I picked a brownie (always a good indicator), a slab or rich looking chocolate cake, and a slice of lemon drizzle cake.

The brownie was good, a lovely texture, a bit too nutty, but nowhere near chocolatey enough. Still the best of the three.
The chocolate cake was dry, only saved by the icing. Still, ok I guess. It was edible.
The lemon drizzle cake was stale. Old, dry and (I thought it was) flavourless. Like they'd forgotten to drizzle it and then left it out on the side for four days.

Oh and when I ordered the cakes I was handed them on a tray. I requested forks and was pointed to the table of what I assumed was take-away cutlery. How wrong I was. We had to use wooden forks. Apparently this is sustainable.
But it's not. Metal cutlery is reusable... fair enough wooden for takeaway. Metal for eat in please! I used my teaspoon in protest.
There was also a lack of sugarpots, I had to use a little plastic sachet which automatically ruined the illusion of class and atmosphere of the entire shop by leaving torn up bits of paper left on the table.


My friends think I am overly fussy for not loving yumchaa. And I know that it is mostly my snobbishness that prevents me from liking it. But I can't help that! I have standards and I will not be tricked into believing that I am consuming tea in the epitome of civilisation.
There are better places to go. Sorry.

I only feel the need to apologise for not liking it as a lot of my friends enjoy this place, and I am massively outnumbered. But meh. It's the truth.

Pictures to follow, J is away on business.

Strange Fruit // Billie Holiday (Abel Meeropol)

I went sloe picking with my mum in October. It’s a regular annual outing as the best sloes to be found are near where my grandmother and uncle live so there’s always somewhere to escape to after traipsing along hedgerows through a persistent drizzle.

The usual foraging etiquette of don’t take to much etc. didn’t used to apply with sloes. Usually there’s a lot of fruit but this year we had a shock. The wild and ragged footpath that follows the river along the floodplain at the bottom of the hills had been “rejuvenated” and a lot of the hedgerows had been hacked back beyond all recognition.

We walked for half an hour down the almost sterile grass path, now ten people wide. We got told off for not being on the footpath as we veered off to look at bushes growing along fences not officially en route. We found approximately five sloes in half an hour.

The aim of our sloe adventure was to eventually make the most delicious winter warmer of a drink; sloe gin. It is a blood red tincture that is the answer to a summer of drinking elderflower cordial; it’s sweet and has a flavour of summer fruits, a rich, dark, black-forest sweetness.

Sloes grow as the bitter fruit of the blackthorn or snag, a traditional hedgerow plant that flowers in spring and fruits in late summer and ripen through to the first frost when they’re at their least bitter. Their “least” bitter is still pretty astringent and that’s why they’re not a very commercially available fruit.

Eventually further down the path we found more sloes on branches that had escaped the pruning by being very high up. As the drizzle set in I climbed fences to reach the top fruits, filled my coat pockets and jumped down. We scrambled under barbed wire to get to the other side of the hedges. Eventually we found a tree stood out on it’s own in a cattle field, covered in the dusty blue fruit. We took all we needed and left, sure that further down there were more leftover. Passers by told us that we needed to go to another spot for the best crops but this was our patch for years and it did us proud.

The first time I made sloe gin I was about 12 and on a walking holiday somewhere near Leeds with my mum and her cousin, an accomplished rambler. We filled a 500ml water bottle with sloes on one walk and when home we followed the following imprecise recipe:

• 500ml bottle full of sloes;
  
• 1L gin;
  
• 1KG bag of sugar
• an extra 500ml bottle.
  

Method:

1. Empty sloes into collinder and give them a quick rinse then Dry lightly.
2. Prick the sloes all over and fill each bottle with an inch or two of sloes.
3. Using the funnel add sugar and shake so that the sugar runs into all the gaps between the sloes
4. Add more sloes, followed by more sugar until the sloes have been equally split between both water bottles and are surrounded by sugar. Each bottle should be approximately half full of the sloes and sugar.
5. Top up the bottles with gin and screw the lid on tight.
6. Over the following months turn the bottle upside down regularly to let the sloes swirl about and the sugar dissolve in the gin, it should mature from pink to a deep red.
7. Open at Christmas or after 3 months and enjoy.

You can strain out the sloes and decant it into a nicer bottle but there’s no harm in having a couple of sloes drop into your glass. It can be drunk neat or with lemonade, both are delicious. More precise recipes and fantastic advice about when to harvest the fruit are available from the cottage smallholder. We tried to do the freezer test but forgot to label the bottles, so we’ll save that for next year.