Tag: tea

Tea with a presidential touch

54DB4FE0-20FC-438E-8A1D-FA593B6FA749
Why do some people people pour their tea into a saucer before drinking it?

Following my columns about tea, I have discovered that we not only have our quirks about the way we make tea, how we add milk, and what shade of brown we like, but there also those who have their own ways of physically drinking it.

I have a specific mug that is my favourite, and if that is in the wash, I have the second best and so on. I like drinking out of a cup and saucer when I’m out at a nice tea shop, because it makes it feel rather special, but I choose not to at home as a cup simply doesn’t contain enough tea for the amount I consume in one sitting. I down three mugs in rapid succession in the morning, so if I was restricted to dainty little cups, I’d be constantly having to fill them up.

But there are some people who don’t drink from either a mug or a cup. I was contacted by Phil Collier from Farndale who told me: “It brought to mind my grandfather, Jack Wardell, who farmed at North Farm, Fadmoor. Grandfather’s tea was always milk first and tea leaves, not bags. He always took his tea in a big cup and saucer. Said tea was then poured into the saucer and drunk from it. Quite a delicate touch for someone with agricultural hands. He drank his tea this way until his death. Thank you for the articles, always something to remind us of the old times.”

I asked Phil if he thought pouring tea from a cup into a saucer was just a quirk of his grandfather, or whether it was a peculiarly North Yorkshire way of supping the brew. He didn’t know, and so both of us asked our mothers if they knew of anyone who drank tea in this rather unusual way, and neither of them did.

After discussing it with his wife Shirley Ann, Phil discovered that her father had also drunk his tea that way. “He was a fruit grower in Norfolk and she thinks it was to cool it so he could get back onto the land. It sounds quite plausible,” he says. So I wondered then if it could it be a quirk of farmers rather than simply a North Yorkshire thing?

Having done a bit more research on this, I can confirm that Shirley Ann is absolutely right. Tea used to be drunk to quench thirst far more than plain water, and usually labourers would only get short breaks. So to be able to drink the steaming hot brew comfortably but within the limited time window, the workers would pour a little bit into their saucers to cool it quickly and allow them to satisfy their thirst.

When tea first started to be drunk many centuries ago in China, it was out of small bowls, which didn’t have handles like today’s teacups. If you’ve been to a Chinese restaurant recently and ordered tea, you will likely still have been served it in little cups without handles. But the green tea popular in China is meant to be drunk warm, rather than hot, and so holding the cup in your bare hands is not an issue.

Back in 18th century Europe, the popularity of Chinese green tea waned to be taken over by Indian black tea, which was drunk at a much higher temperature. It was difficult to hold the cup with bare hands, and that’s when we begin to see cups being made with handles on them, the first purportedly appearing in 1707 Germany thanks to a porcelain inventor named Johann Friedrich Bottge.

The problem of drips and spillages meant that soon after that saucers began to be made upon which you could set these daintily-handled little cups, saving scorched hands as well as protecting tables and fine cloths from stains due to spilt tea.

In the 18th century, pouring your tea into your saucer wasn’t just the preserve of lowly labourers, but was a fashionable thing to do among the well-to-do. There is a story that when Thomas Jefferson was questioning why the USA needed a Senate, George Washington explained that the Senate’s job was to ‘cool’ the heat of suggested legislation in the same way that Jefferson poured tea into his saucer to cool it down.

So it seems Phil Collier’s grandfather’s method of drinking tea was actually inspired by presidents.

Read more at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington and Stockton Times on 3rd and Ryedale Gazette and Herald on 1st February 2023

How do you take it?

E46B4BCD-A8E4-4401-BBC3-8944C7FC28A8
Which is the ‘right’ colour of tea?

My recent column about tea bags resulted in some spirited feedback. If you recall, I wrote that I make time each day to switch off and enjoy a pot of proper tea made with good quality leaves. It is an essential part of my routine, and for me, is like therapy, having seen me through many a stressful time in my life. When teabags were first invented, though, they were viewed as rather posh, but over the years they became more popular than leaves, and thus the roles have reversed, with leaf tea now being seen as a bit more upmarket.

Reader Sarah Mason says that her family have always preferred tea leaves over bags. She writes: “Sacrilege in my house to use tea bags…Way back when, Mum and Dad didn’t even use a tea strainer. So it was dangerous to empty your cup completely. Good for reading your future though, apparently!”

I don’t use a strainer either, and have a habit of always leaving a bit of tea in the bottom of my cup, even when it has been made with bags and so is complete unnecessary. I’ve never tried to read my dregs though, and the art of doing so is known a Tassography (yes, it is a bona fide ‘ography’). The Chinese, for whom tea drinking has been a highly significant ritual for centuries, are thought to be the first to have ‘read’ the leaves, but it became popular in Europe among soothsayers and fortune-tellers during the superstitious 17th century once tea-drinking had become commonplace.

Clare Proctor, who could claim to be an expert on the brew due to the fact she owns a rather nice tea shop on the Shambles in York, says: “I was brought up with the idea that proper tea was made with loose leaf tea in a pot and it was terribly vulgar to use bags…By the way, you could start another debate – which goes in the cup first – milk or tea?”

She has a point. I asked Clare what she did, and she replied that she fills her cup half way, then adds milk until it is the right colour. But what is the ‘right’ colour? For me it would be a deep brown, akin to what those of us of a certain age might know as ‘American Tan’ (for the youngsters, that is a fetching colour of women’s tights from the 1970s). For many others, the right colour is more like off white, due to the fact they seem to put more milk than tea in their cups in a concoction that barely deserves to be called tea. Another reader, Gareth Child, believes putting milk in at all is totally unacceptable!

There is also the question of the water/leaf ratio. Because I like my tea fairly dark, people assume I want a really strong brew. They proffer something akin to tar thinking that’s what I like, and throw in far too much milk. I try to explain that I like an average-strength tea, but with only a small amount of milk. I’m not fussy really. Well, I am, a bit. Or maybe a lot. But when it comes to tea, it matters.

So back to the question of milk first/tea first. What do you do? Are you in the Proctor camp, with milk after, or like me, milk first? Believe it or not the answer is a reflection of your ancestral status in society.

When we first began importing black tea from India in the eighteenth century, only the rich could afford to buy it. They’d sip this precious elixir from fine bone china cups, taking the edge off the bitter taste with a drop of the finest milk poured into the top. As the product became more popular, and thus more affordable, the hoi poloi began to indulge, but when they poured the hot infusion into their rough terracotta mugs, the boiling water cracked the clay causing it to leak. They soon realised that if they put the milk in first, it would cool it down and thus solve the problem. Of course, bone china is incredibly strong and easily tolerated the hot liquid.

So you can deduce a person’s breeding by the way they drink their cuppa. Milk last means you are from fine stock. Milk first and you’re common as muck.

Just like me.

Read more at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington and Stockton Times on 13th and Ryedale Gazette and Herald on 11th January 2023

Bagged myself a cuppa

CCDFD167-17B7-479A-AA82-E02B3582F078
My local cafe serves a lovely cup of tea made in a pot with leaves

 

There is a lovely tea shop in my home village and my mum and I recently stopped there for a cuppa. The tea tasted really good, which isn’t always the case when you don’t make it yourself. Tea-making is quite an art, and not many people get it right.

Thankfully, our local café does a fine job, not least because they use loose leaves in a pot which gives the tea a depth of flavour that is hard to achieve when using bags alone.

Using leaves is viewed as a bit posh these days, but it wasn’t the case when bags first appeared. My mum recalled a funny story from her younger days when her own mother was visited by an unexpected guest and was quite apologetic when she could only offer tea made with leaves. Tea bags had only landed on British shores a few years earlier in around 1939, and no doubt it became the done thing to demonstrate you were part of the fashionable elite by having them in your home. They left no irritating rogue leaves floating about, didn’t leave sludge at the bottom of the cup, and didn’t make a mess when you emptied the pot down the sink. The refined bag took care of all that nonsense. No wonder my Nana felt bad about offering her guest common or garden leaf tea! 

The majority of Brits were late adopters of the sachet of dreams. Loose tea had arrived on our shores in the 17th century from China, with the earliest being a type of green tea that was drunk without milk. By the following century, stronger black teas became popular, and that’s when we began to add milk to make it more palatable. By the 19th century we were sourcing much of our tea from new markets in India, which soon overtook China as our main supplier. 

Entrepreneurial minds were always looking for solutions to the perennial problem of messy leaves, and so inventors created little metal infusers known as ‘tea eggs’ or ‘tea balls’ that were suspended either into a pot or a cup on a metal chain. 

An American chap called Thomas Sullivan is often credited with inventing the tea bag in 1908, but in fact it was two women, Roberta Lawson and Mary McLaren from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that patented a design in 1901 where leaves were placed in individual loose-weave cotton pockets designed for one cup.

Sullivan, who was a tea and coffee merchant, used to send clients samples of his wares inside little drawstrung silk pouches. But those who received them, having seen the Lawson/McLaren invention, mistakenly used the string to hold on to the pouch while lowering it into their cups, rather than opening up the pouch and pouring out the contents as Sullivan had intended.

The little pouches became incredibly popular, and Sullivan spotted an opportunity, realising the silk weave was too fine to allow the tea to brew properly. He set about inventing something similar, but better, and landed on the idea of using a type of gauze rather than silk which would allow the full flavour of the leaves to come through. By the 1930s, the gauze had been replaced by a kind of filter paper, and loose leaf tea began to disappear from US shop shelves. 

The well-known tea suppliers Tetley were the first to bring them over from America in 1939 but we, as we Brits tend to be, were a bit wary of this strange new concept, and it wasn’t until 1952 that rivals Lipton sparked a leap in popularity when they patented their ‘Flo-Thru’ tea bag. Having said that, by the end of the 1960s, only three per cent of the population were regularly using tea bags. By the year 2000, though, that figure had surged to 95%.

For me, a good cup of tea is like therapy, and has seen me through many stressful events. I make time every day to switch off from whatever I’m doing and enjoy a pot of proper tea made with good quality leaves.

If you must use bag in a cup, though, please take this tip from an expert. Never, but NEVER, squeeze a tea bag. Instead, just pop it into your cup of just-boiled water and leave it to seep (or steep or mash or brew) until it is just the right colour.

Now there’s a topic for another day!

Read more at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington and Stockton Times on 16th and Ryedale Gazette and Herald on 14th December 2022