My first memory of drinking tea was when I was a little girl and was taken on a special visit to Lion’s Corner House in London. My eyes gawked at the site of cream cakes, stacked on a 3-tier silver cake base, and little sandwiches beautifully cut into all sorts of shapes, waiting to be devoured by my insatiable appetite. When the waitress arrived, dressed in her white starched cap and her black dress, with a white lace apron, I sat very still and contemplated what cream pie I was going to have. However, before I could get that far, there was an argument between adults about what kind of tea we would drink. My mother opted for the English breakfast, but my grandmother decided that we would have her favorite “Earl Grey”.
It’s hard to imagine that, at one time, tea was considered unpleasant and unhealthy in England, and was also highly taxed, but Queen Elizabeth saw tea as a highly profitable investment. She chartered the East India Co. in 1600 and gave it a monopoly on trade in the East. For more than 250 years, the company was a crucial player in the rise and fall of the British colonial empire.
The queen introduced tea as a breakfast drink to replace beer. The idea that tea could accompany food was quite abhorrent to some, they even added salt and spices. The ignorant few decided to chew the leaves! It wasn’t until the Duchess of Bedford devised a tea ceremony in the mid-18th century that tea became an English institution. At the end of the 17th century, tea was the national drink of England. Tea gardens abounded in many places, where drinking became an excuse to meet friends and perhaps lovers!
Until that time, China had been England’s only source of tea, but East India co. discovered the Indian tea plant in the early 18th century, however, the obsession with growing Chinese tea was prevalent, but China was unwilling to reveal any secrets about the methods of propagation and drying that had been kept for centuries behind the Great Wall . India tried to tell the company that its native herb was worth all the tea in China, but the company stubbornly insisted on planting the Chinese seeds.
By the end of the 19th century, the East India Company had produced an estimated 170 million pounds of tea, three-quarters of which kept the English busy boiling water!
In the early 1900s something happened that changed the way the Western world viewed tea. In 1904, the St Louis World’s Fair took place on a very hot day in a humid summer. Indian tea growers had taken over a stand to advertise their product, but no one seemed to be interested in the steaming hot drink, until someone poured the tea into a glass with ice, now people were flocking to the stall to quench their thirst. with this new concoction, and Americans still prefer their iced tea today.
I hope to bring you more information on tea, in a later ezine.
In the meantime, always remember to bring the kettle to the kettle, and not the other way around!!
Ena Clewes
