Picky tea
A couple of days ago, I mentioned on my Facebook page the popularity of ‘picky bits’ as part of a British Christmas, and that made the historian part of my brain wonder where that came from.
With some help from Gemini (yes, I use AI in my research – I’m not proud of it, but I do admit that it does a decent job), I discovered that picky bits / picky tea as a phrase describing various items of cold food served as a meal dates back to at least the 1960s, and originates in the Midlands and/or North of England. I would guess – although that’s never a good thing for a historian to do – that the practice dates back further than that and existed outside that geographical area.
It’s kinda the British equivalent of tapas, or mezze, or various other European snacking traditions, although the British version traditionally included mostly beige food: sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, cheese and onion quiche (although in my family it was called ‘flan’, and mum won’t eat it unless I call it that, as she doesn’t like quiche but does like flan). (No, that makes no sense to me, either!)
If you’re a TikTok user, which I’m not, you might be familiar with the concept of #girldinner, which is basically a US version of the same thing, with a more TikTok-able label. The concept is the same, though: acquiring a plate of sustenance with minimal effort.
A dinner of picky bits on Christmas Eve has been part of my family’s Christmas traditions for as long as I can remember, and the internet shows that this is the case for many people. I suppose it makes perfect sense: if whoever does the cooking is going to be cooking a big, fancy meal on Christmas Day, they don’t want to be cooking much the previous day.
Every Christmas, UK supermarkets start competing over who can produce the best party food. From the season’s adverts, you might imagine that every British household has many parties every year, each requiring multiple canapes, but I strongly suspect much of it goes towards picky teas. I don’t suppose anyone fancies sponsoring an academic study for me to find out?
Tonight’s picky tea nearly didn’t happen, as mum had a vicious headache for most of the day and said she didn’t want any dinner. The headache is, I suspect, a result of not having had any propanalol for the past two days, as the person who prescribed it didn’t tell me that it hadn’t been added to mum’s repeat prescription list and I had to reorder it. We therefore ran out and are hoping Father Christmas1 will bring some later.
In the end mum changed her mind and did have some food from the offered selection: gammon crackling joint (without the crackling, which she doesn’t like; heartbroken that I have to eat it all 🤭), mozzarella sticks, cheese and bacon mini rostis, and salad. Then mum had coffee ice cream, and I had a chocolate doughnut with chocolate ice cream, and now we’re both dozily watching tv and wondering which of us is going to cave and go and do the washing up.
And that’s all there is for today. If I don’t post tomorrow, have a lovely Christmas, and I’ll see you back here on Boxing Day.
- Father Christmas in the guise of the local pharmacist, that is. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 