How To Build a Tea Room

From the forthcoming cookbook and memoir, The Little Podunk Almanac of Tea:

“Make me scones,” my daughter said. She was four, and was not accustomed to my being home during the day. 

“I don’t know how,” I answered. I had a glorious day off from my job as senior editor of children’s books at the now-defunct print version of Kirkus Reviews. It was very likely 1996, because in a home full of books, she no longer needed help getting the cookbooks off the low shelf. She pulled Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey’s fabulous nuts-and-bolts go at “The New York Times Cookbook” and handed it to me. It was the first cookbook I’d ever purchased, at the behest of my friend and colleague, Jan Aldrich Solow. (“It’s not only perfect for learning techniques,” she’d said. “It uses ingredients I actually have in my refrigerator.”)

“Where did you hear about scones?” I asked. Really. We were a tea-and-toast sort of family, and she hadn’t yet begun her annual pilgrimage to one of many tea rooms in the city. Her first tea party in a restaurant was when she turned five and the location—of course—was the Plaza. But that was a year off. 

“Where I hear everything,” she replied. “TV.”

For a mother in publishing,who wanted the answer to that question to be, all times and forever, “A book,” this was a bit of a setback. However, I rallied, and we looked up the recipe. It was very easy.

I was no novice in the kitchen, for I’d grown up with a family who ate out for special occasions only, meaning, 25th wedding anniversaries and galas. Dining outside the home meant eating at someone else’s house, or a couple of Sundays a year, at the International House of Pancakes. Going to McDonald’s was an event to be cherished, and the Dairy Queen was the province of teenagers. I am thinking about all of this for almost the very first time, and perhaps it’s been statistically analyzed, but “eating in” was almost the only thing we did. And as a result, I remember the scent of people’s home-cooking for almost all the important events of my life, and not the smell of the restaurants.

So I had learned a lot from elderly aunts who were biscuit-makers and bread-bakers and pie-angels (who, to their delight in old age, with smaller kitchens and fewer people to cook for, discovered frozen pies in the grocery stores in the 1970s) and birthday cakes from a boxed mix along with fancy brownies that included rivers of cream cheese and bing cherries. In my mother’s West St. Paul kitchen, I cooked along to reruns of “Little House on the Prairie” and “Brady Bunch,” stirring up lemon bread and batches of peanut butter cookies. I always knew what I was doing.

As for the ingredients in that recipe, to me they were precious. Before I opened the tea room, where we watch a couple of pounds of butter go into the mixer for a batch of cookies, every stick of butter was valuable. In New York, on a publishing paycheck ($7,600 a year, people), I couldn’t even afford butter. When I married my husband in 1983, I was a freelance editor and the money was even worse. I had learned to make a beef stew (a little beef and a lot of stew) that could last for a week if we ate it on plates I fashioned out of bread dough (tiny amounts of expensive yeast and sugar, lots of flour, water, and salt, and long, long rising times to make it fluffy). The rest of the time we lived on reused tea bags and toast. 

When I read the scone recipe, I had every reason to believe that with my skills and those few common ingredients, the results would be heavenly.

The scones were just terrible. And I didn’t know why. I had kneaded the dough ten times, just to be safe, and I had measured everything because, in those days, I did (I mostly don’t anymore, infuriating anyone attempting to help me). But Samia had one bite and said, “Thanks!” and walked away, while my husband, adoring anything freshly baked, ate the other three. That’s the thing. The recipe made about four scones. I reread it so often the page grew tattered. I made it a second time, the following Sunday. Samia wandered into the kitchen, and said, I think, “Why are you making those again?”

I didn’t know why. I repeat that phrase in the shop all the time. People come in and think there was a big honking grand design behind Podunk, but people are wrong. My husband called us the “amateur olympics,” and frequently reminded newcomers to the place that I wasn’t professionally trained. “All we do is make it fresh every single day,” he’d say. “That’s absolutely our only claim of any kind.” And I’d spent the first year of Podunk feeling like I was at a very pricey bake sale with a huge overhead. The most expensive bake sale of all time. And while we’re at it, let’s make the whole family show up and hang around while no one comes to the bake sale. 

But I kept making the scones, with a little more of this and a little less of that, and Samia and Karim became enamored of the scent of them, each Sunday, and we added more jams, and cut some raspberries and honey into sweet butter one week, and we all got so accustomed to fresh scones that I lost track of whether they were any good or not. They were hot out of the oven, and they never had time to cool before they were eaten.

I doubled the recipe, thinking we could eat the leftovers the next day, but no. Scones have a three-hour window, if that. When people try to buy a bunch of scones to take home, I start protesting. At first they think it is humility, and then they discover I am serious. I hate scones the next day. I shudder when I see packaged scones in supermarkets. I just can’t. My daughter, now 22, will see people “saving” their scones for later, and shake her head. 

We’ve always called her the little troublemaker, endearingly, of course. I often tell customers about one of the last conversations we had, before we started trudging up and down the streets of New York, gazing at “For Lease” signs. We didn’t “start” Podunk or even launch it. There was no epiphany, no moment of truth. Just as the onset of winter is gradual, beginning, perhaps, with the unfurling of buds in spring, so was the onset of this little tearoom. If there was a moment, though, when I finally realized that many things were wrong with the way life was, Samia put it into words. Disappointed for the hundredth time that I would be home late from work, she said she wished that I would quit. 

“What do you think I should do instead?”

“I don't know.”

“You know that people work, sometimes, because they need money, right?” I explained, hoping that her nine-year-old's common sense would kick in.

“You could do something else. We could all do it together,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like a bakery,” she said. “We could go live in a bakery, and we could have tea and things whenever we want.” She wasn't pulling this idea out of the blue, though both my husband and I gave her credit for reminding us, at a critical moment, that we had often joked about chucking it all aside and opening a little place of our own.

The very first time I dared to quadruple the recipe for scones was the day we turned around the “Open” sign at Podunk, on August 31, 2002. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, because a water main on the street had been broken and we’d had no water all day. But we were determined to open in August, and so we did. There were hot scones, cupcakes, cardamom cake, Uncle Hat bars, and a few different cookies. We made $97, and most of that was in scones.