American "bed & breakfast" tea-culture

[mbanu]

Another interesting tea-snack that seems to show up again and again is "Congo bars" (originally called cookies or squares) -- apparently these were popularized by Nestlé through advertisements in American magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and the Ladies' Home Journal in the early 1940s as a way to use their new chocolate chips, but I can't seem to find anything on the origin of the name or who the original inventor was. Maybe it was named after a bed & breakfast, like The Toll House Inn that first produced Toll House cookies.

[LeoFox]

Another interesting tea-snack that seems to show up again and again is "Congo bars" (originally called cookies or squares) -- apparently these were popularized by Nestlé through advertisements in American magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and the Ladies' Home Journal in the early 1940s as a way to use their new chocolate chips, but I can't seem to find anything on the origin of the name or who the original inventor was. Maybe it was named after a bed & breakfast, like The Toll House Inn that first produced Toll House cookies.

The name Congo Bars is a fanciful allusion to a mythical Congo, which also inspired the famous Congo Room of Las Vegas, and even the Congo Room of Canton, Ohio. Perhaps someone thought that all of the exotic ingredients (the chocolate, the coconut) might come from Africa. In New Orleans, there is a plaza called “Congo Square” (also known as Beauregard Square and now part of Louis Armstrong Park) which, in the early 19th century, was a gathering place for both free and enslaved African-Americans who met for marketing, music-making, and dancing — and eating this variety of brownie? Who knows?

https://rumblytumbly.com/2016/04/07/congo-bars/

[wave_code]

I can't seem to find anything on the origin of the name

racism, thats the origin

[mbanu]

My guess would have been maybe that Nestlé sourced their chocolate chips from the Belgian Congo (as it was known in the 40s), and used the term to make the recipe sound more exciting. I've seen this before with old recipes that were called "Chinese" because they had water chestnuts in them or something similar, despite otherwise being thoroughly non-Chinese recipes.

I don't really know, though -- the origin of the name is a mystery to me.

[mbanu]

A clue! It looks like congo squares might have been invented (or at least first marketed) by Lamont, Corliss, and Company, a marketing firm that was Nestlé's U.S. representative.

From a 1949 trade magazine:

Lamont, Corliss & Co. (New York) had such good success plugging Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate in recipes for Toll House cookies and quick fudge that it will flash a recipe for congo squares in the May issues of Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal, American Weekly, This Week and Parade (via Cecil & Presbrey, Inc.)

On the other hand, this may be a dead-end, as I don't believe this agency exists anymore.

[mbanu]

Due to a mention of chocolate teas on another thread, here is a recipe from The Inn at Perry Cabin, a B&B in St. Michaels, Maryland that was featured in Gail Greco's "Tea-Time at the Inn":

CHOCOLATE TEA

6 tablespoons loose Orange Pekoe tea
2 teaspoons cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 cup sweetened whipped cream
1 tablespoon grated dark chocolate

Brew tea to desired strength. * Stir in cocoa, peel, and brown sugar. * Steep 30 minutes. * Pour into 6 cups. * Add a dollop of whipped cream to each and garnish with grated chocolate. Yield: 6 cups

[LeoFox]

My wife is addicted to the pu erh chocolate blend from numi

[debunix]

Fine chocolate goes so well with tea that I’ve never considered mixing chocolate *with* tea. But I can see the appeal of the smoothness and mellowing effects of cocoa butter—like adding milk—if you used actual chocolate. Not as clear on how adding just cocoa would impact flavor.

[mbanu]

It seems like the U.S. struggles to support formal tearooms outside of unique markets, but there is a widespread "bed & breakfast" culture that has adopted tea as part of the package, which I find fascinating.

I picked up a copy of a new-to-me book recently, Jan Whitaker's Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America, that seems to connect the two -- there was a particular type of tea room that became popular in rural New England after the rise of the automobile as a recreational vehicle and the extension of paved roads into rural areas. Although started as exclusive teahouses initially, many spread into offering other meals and lodging, leading to American bed & breakfasts.

A few quotes:

In 1920, 8 million passenger cars were registered in this country, compared to the 200 million on the roads today. Cars were regarded primarily as recreational vehicles, rather than dependable means of transportation. Most Americans relied on trains, trolleys, and their own two feet to get where they were going. Cars broke down or had to have tires replaced with almost predictable regularity, the roads were terrible, many unpaved and deeply rutted... Paved roads meant more cars on the move, and as a consequence more business for country tea-rooms. The greater number of paved roads in New England is probably why there were more roadside tea rooms there than anywhere else in the country.

At the same time as Greenwich Village tea rooms were emerging, the rural New England-style tea room, which had begun around 1910, was chugging right along, increasingly specializing in chicken and waffle dinners, and adding gift shops, overnight accommodations, and gas pumps out front. Everything was designed to capture the tourist dollar, and yet these enterprises remained surprisingly uncommercial, just like their successors, the country inns and bed-and-breakfasts of today. Throughout the 1920, 1930s, and 1940s, roadside tea shops and tea houses spread across much of the United States, even making it into the South, an area supplied with relatively few restaurants until after the Second World War.

(Greenwich Village tea rooms seemed to be a kind of bohemian tearoom that became popular in response to snobbishly formal hotel teas, it sounds like.)

Also groups that I don't quite know how to place, such as the "church tea" folks, who like the Zen folks rolled their tea-drinking into their spirituality. With them the fixation was on the "Christmas teas".

Still not quite sure how to place American church-tea culture, but the Whitaker book did have a just-so origin story that traces it back to colonial-revival fundraisers during the American centennial.

Back in the nineteenth century, women acquired the tea-drinking habit as they held Martha Washington teas to raise funds for churches and other causes and to commemorate the first president and the first lady.