How do you take your tea? Clear or milky? Black or green?
Morning, noon or night? Spontaneously, or ceremoniously?
I am reading a lovely book called Tea in the East by Carole Manchester. I say "lovely" partly for the moody photographs of faroff places and exotic foods, but mainly for the subject itself. Tea is warm, friendly, relaxing and personal.
I'm learning a lot about how people of differing cultures take tea in differing ways.
In Hong Kong, a scholarly retailer of fine teas arranges a tasting of gong foo, a precious blend created in his store. The water is charcoal filtered and is heated to just below the boiling point. The tea is infused in a small clay teapot and drunk from tiny china cups.
First, hot water is poured over the teapot, to warm it.
The pot is then one-third filled with tea leaves, then topped up with hot water, which is instantly poured away. This is called "washing the leaves." The first infusion lasts perhaps 30 seconds. The resulting tea is poured into two sets of cups; one is for experiencing the aroma of the tea, the other is for tasting. Like a wine tasting, every aspect of the brew is studied and recorded - colour, aroma, foretaste, aftertaste. The tea tasting follows the same pattern, with the initial pot of leaves being infused several times before it is discarded.
That's a connoisseur's take on tea. A more convivial approach exists in Russia and surrounding countries, based on the use of samovars. A samovar is a device for heating water and keeping it hot, mainly to ensure a constant supply of tea. First, very strong tea is made from green or black leaves in a small teapot that sits on top of the samovar to keep warm. Tea is prepared for drinking by pouring concentrate into a glass and diluting it to taste with hot water from the samovar's spigot.
Popular enhancements include lemon, sugar, milk, spices, spoonfuls of jam. I imagine the more people sharing the samovar, the better the tea tastes.
In Tibet, tea is treated as a source of energy, a basic food. Traditionally, the tea leaves arrive in the form of a hard brick. Making pa cha, butter tea, begins with hacking pieces off the brick and steeping them in water. The leaves are then boiled vigorously and transferred to a churn with salt, yak milk and yak butter. The churn is a cylindrical device with a plunger that is pumped up and down. Manchester describes the end result as "thick and oily," which I can well believe.
I'm sure you are dying to know how tea is taken at another exotic location - our home on Galiano. Glad you asked.
We are a simple, economical and unpretentious couple, and have developed a tea ceremony to match. The time is fixed at 4 p.m., give or take a half hour either way. The leaves we use are black and loose, purchased in 900-gram hermetically sealed packages, which we believe can only be found at Indian grocers - so we top up our pickle, spice, ghee and garlic paste supplies at the same time. For a tea caddy we use an ancient Lipton Yellow Label tin with a tight-fitting lid. We brew our tea in an artisanal stoneware tea pot, made on Galiano, a little chipped around the lid but otherwise serving us well: its spout has never dribbled once in its entire life.
A recent innovation in our tea routine is the replacement of untrustworthy tea balls with an infuser. This is a mesh contrivance that we fill with loose tea - a spoonful for each one of us, another for the pot - suspend it in the opening of the (warmed) teapot, then fill the pot with water just off the boil. Four minutes later we remove the infuser, replace the chipped lid, and pour.
The result is not a perfect cuppa, because we drink it from mugs. But I believe it's a perfect mugga.
