There is no finer sight in English food than the cricket tea. This one was particularly good, served on a sunny afternoon in Dorset. I had spent the previous half an hour watching my ‘bowling’ be carted to every corner of the county, so my ego was bruised. It was a balm to clatter into the pavilion and see the spread laid out before us.
I made my way around the table anticlockwise, picking up crustless finger sandwiches that were lined up in snug military rows, piles of miniature sausage rolls, slices of cheese on baguette, fat triangles of shortbread, a handful of crisps, a scone covered in cream and jam, and a slice of cake.
As I set about this platter, I realised what all these foods had in common. As Coldplay might put it, they were all yellow. There was a wide spectrum, light and dark, flax and gold, and wheat and champagne, but they were all of the same family. Even a heap of sliced melon, a gesture to stave off scurvy, was a bright sunny chartreuse.
It is not the only time I have been cheered by a yellow spread. At a wedding earlier in the summer, the reception was in a pub that laid on an equally appetising selection, based around mountains of sausage rolls and two types of chips, sitting brightly in their bowls.
When colleagues leave The Telegraph, they are often treated to what we call a ‘beige buffet’, where someone is dispatched to the supermarket and returns with crisps, Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, cheese straws, samosas, hummus and sundry other snacks that sit somewhere between wan and mustard brown in colour. The shops know their market: look in the ‘picnic’ section and you’ll find overwhelmingly yellowish food staring back at you.
Let the Mediterraneans keep their plates of verdant leaves and vibrant tomatoes. When we need comfort and familiarity in our food, we turn to yellow. Yellow is the colour of potatoes and pasta and butter and cheese and pastry and bread, tacos and dosas and naan and paella, fat and carbohydrate and stodge.
You might argue that all human civilisation is predicated on yellow food. Green might signal that your body is about to receive something fresh and healthy. Yellow says something much more important: you are not going to starve. Soon, you may even be so full and lethargic that you need a little snooze. For the deep savannah brain, this is much more reassuring than thinking you will be getting enough antioxidants.
Yet yellow food is out of favour. All the advice encourages us away from Greggs and McDonald’s, cornucopias of yellow, and into places serving punishing ‘green goddess’ juices. Our beige buffets are eaten with a certain amount of defiance.
The cricket tea is on the way out, too. In Dorset, one of the old hands explained that during the pandemic, tea was paused as a possible source of contamination. After it was safe to bring it back, many clubs decided they could not be bothered with the cost and fuss. It’s a pity. The cricket tea is a wonderful tradition, which reminds players who have spent hours flinging a leather rock at each other that there are more important things to worry about. This is how civilisation crumbles: one yellow food at a time.
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