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Tea time, an old tradition
Tea Time
A briefhistory of the traditions surrounding tea
By Eve Zibart (The Washington Post)
"East is East and West is West," Rudyard Kipling wrote, and though the twain have clerly met, there is one fairly major cultural difference. In Asia, people drink tea; in Britain and the United States, people eat it.
Afternoon tea, high tea, cream tea, queen's tea. The limbo between lunch and liquor has been filled by Westerners with a meal named for the libation but laden with delights.
CHINESE TEA CONNOISSEURS think that, as with wines, certain teas are more complementary to specific foods. Green teas are said to be best with seafood, white with vegetarian dishes, oolong with game and black with roast pork.
Scented and herbal teas, or tisanes, the healthful infusions preferred by Hercule Poirot and his ilk, are brewed from any number of flowers and herbs (often in combination with true tea leaves), including jasmine, rose, gardenia, lavender, hibiscus, various mints, rose hips, eucalyptus and chrysanthemum leaves, which unfurl as they steep, like those children's sponge toys. There are teas made of seaweeds, flowers and rice hulls; the Japanese drink cold barley tea in summer. Koreans prepare some of the most aromatic teas from roasted corn or barley, wild sesame grains, ginseng, ginger, cinnamon, citron and quince.
Tea has been known in China for perhaps 2,500 years - 5,000 years, according to one legend - and a national staple for at least 2,000. It was originally referred to as "Cha" from which the Japanese "Cha" and the Indian "Chai" derive (and maybe even the Scots "Char"); and the only became "t'ei" later when the British set up shop in Fujian, where that was the local term.
"Is there no Latin word for Tea?" wrote Hilaire Belloc. "Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone."
It was not until the Ming Dynasty (1364-1644) that the fermentation techniques were developed to cater to the increased demand for exports. That's alson about the time teas began to be brewed in the fashion we think of today- in teapots, instead of beaten into water (as in the Japanese tea ceremony), chewed like snuff, used in fires to flavor or smoke foods, or boiled in soup.
Over the centuries the Chinese - missionary Buddhist priests, mostly - carried tea to Korea and Japan, and it gradually spread int Southeast Asia, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Appropriately, it was European missionaries who first encountered tea in China. Early in the 17th century, the Chinese made a present of tea to Czar Alexis of Russia, which launched an extremely important export trade; Russia remains one of the thirstiest tea-consuming countries in the world.
Not long after that, the Portuguese traders carried tea back from their colony at Macao to Lisbon, where it became an instant craze; their Dutch allies carried it to Frnce, the Balkans and their own colonies, including New Amsterdam-Manhattan. After the Portuguese princess, Catharine of Braganza, married Charles II and brought tea to London, the tea trade became so profitable - and the opium wars with China so disruptive - that the British East India Company decided to bypass the Dutch and Portuguese middlemen by planting bushes all over India, and later Kenya.
SO THE TEA SERVICE became part of the imperial regalia. But it was not yet a ritual. As the story goes, the next big trendsetter was Anna, the Duchess of Bedford, who in the early 1840s ordered up a few "sandwiches" to be brought secretly to her boudoir because she grew peckish between the often light, self-serve lunch and the huge, late-summer dinners.
Anna was risking ridicule, but as it happened, her stopgap meal became a huge hit; and by 1861, even so conservative an authority as Mrs. Beeton had pronounced afternoon tea a meal of "elegant trifles".
However, memorable as the Duchess of Bedford may be, the ppularity of tea as an occasion probably predates her. The coffee shop of Thomas Garraway had begun selling tea in 1667, both as a trendy beverage and a virtual cure-all; the profitable tea trade provided the seed money for the modernday specialty food catalogue.
In the 1860s, London grocer Thomas Lipton decided to cut out the middlemen and sell directly to his customers, which began to turn the beverage into a staple. Early in the 18th century, with the emergence of the teahouses and warm-weather tea gardens, it became "suitable" for well-born women to go out in the afternoon with an escort and gossip or flirt over the teapot.
High tea, which is a main or "meat" meal rather than a light supper, dates from about a century ago, wh en the grand hotels of the Edwardian era offered three-course afternoon repasts that ranged far beyond breads to cold roasts, game, kippers, curried eggs and Welsh rabbit.
These days, the menu for a typical afternoon tea includes a scone, assorted finger sandwiches, tea breads (banana, pumpkin, cranberry muffins), lots of pastries (shortbread, white chocolate cups, mini-tarts or cream puffs) and cookies.
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Good tea starts with the leaf
By Eve Zibart (The Washington Post)
All True Tears are of the same species, an evergreen branch of the camellia family. They grow more slowly, and the flavor develops more fully, at higher altitudes, which is why such teas as Ceylon and Darjeeling, which are cultivated above 4,000 feet, are so prized.
Some people believe the bush itself is actually indigenous to Tibet. Teas with small leaves are considered the most desirable; ideally, only the top two or three leaves are picked at a time, more like pinching.
The various types of tea bushes and different ways of fermenting the leaves produce three major types: black, green and oolong.
BLACK TEA (referred to as "red tea" in Chinese and Japanese) is the biggest bodied tea: Leaves for these are wilted, crushed or "rolled", fully fermented (it's the oxygenation that darkens the leaves) and roasted. The famous Lapsang Souchong from Fujian province in China is first fermented, then smoked, which gives it a loamy or tarry pungency - the single malt Scotch of teas. There are even deeper - flavored double-fermented teas used as digestifs.
OOLONG TEAS, which the Dutch called Formosa, are usually referred to as "semi-fermented"; they are whole-leaf teas wilted, bruised and then sun-dried only until the leaves start to yellow. Pouchong, a very delicate oolong tea, is very like green tea.
GREEN TEAS are steamed or lightly roasted but unfermented (except in Burma, where fermented green tea leaves are a popular flavoring). They are produced in a range of qualities and textures: powdered, dried, broken and whole leaf.
There are white teas as well, which are made from unfermented dried tea leaf buds. These teas look silvery when dried and produce pale yellow or straw-colored-toamber tea, and the leaves often stand up on end in the cup.