severe tea

English

Noun

severe tea (plural severe teas)

  1. (archaic) A large evening meal, less formal than dinner, typically including various cooked foods served with tea.
    • 1853, Catherine Sinclair, “The Priest and the Curate”, in London Homes: including The Murder Hole; The Drowning Dragoon; The Priest and the Curate; Lady Mary Pierrepoint; & Frank Vansittart‎[1], page 29:
      Heard Lady Mary, as I left her room yesterday, say to her sympathizing maid, "I shall keep a strict fast and take no dinner to-day." Felt pleased, as in general her appetite is sinfully good; but she added, in a tone of mournful reflection: "Tell Mrs. Jobson to send me a severe tea at six, with fried sole, omelette, muffins, poached eggs, scolloped oysters, and several kinds of preserves."
    • 1863, Anne Manning, Meadowleigh: A Tale of English Country Life‎[2], page 305:
      Now and then he gets an invitation to dinner, sometimes to tea. Not a kettle-drum before dinner, mark you — an invention that had not yet reached Meadowleigh — but a severe tea of the substantial sort.
    • 1889, William Westgarth, Half a Century of Australasian Progress‎[3], page 34:
      Darkness had set in, and we could only wend our not too weary way to the comfortable "Commercial Hotel," where we gathered around that most attractive of all travel-endings, at least after seven p.m., the tea-table, complemented by what is included in the hunger-edged phrase "a severe tea".
    • 1897, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Chartwell Books, published 2024, →ISBN, page 90:
      We had a capital "severe tea" at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little old-fashioned inn, with a bow-window right over the seaweed-covered rocks of the strand. I believe we would have shocked the "New Woman" with our appetites.
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