‘East is East and West is West,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, and though the twain have clearly met, there is one fairly major cultural difference. In Asia, they drink tea; in Britain and the United States, we eat it.
Afternoon tea, high tea, cream tea, queen’s tea . . . . The limbo between lunch and liquor has been filled with a meal named for the libation but laden with delights. Americans aren’t just crooking their little fingers, they’re digging in with both hands and licking them clean.
Oh, we may speak of taking Chinese tea or Japanese tea or even Indian tea, but it’s not the pot we’re after, it’s the plate. The platter, actually, those three-tier cake stands piled with pates and pastries and petit fours, salmon and scones and asparagus, watercress and white chocolate and walnut bread. Strawberries, raspberries, preserves, marmalades, double cream, powdered sugar — we have no shame.
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. Perhaps you should consider how hefty those tea sandwiches really are.
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 called ch’a, from which the Japanese cha and the Indian chai derive (and maybe even the Scots char). It only became t’ei later when the British set up shop in Fujian, where that was the local term.
It was not until the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) that the fermentation techniques were developed to cater to the increased demand for exports. That’s also 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 into 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 still 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 France, 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. By 1861, even so conservative an authority as Mrs. Beeton had pronounced afternoon tea a meal of “elegant trifles.”
Memorable as the Duchess of Bedford may be, the popularity of tea as an occasion probably predates her. The coffeeshop of Thomas Garraway had begun selling tea in 1667, as a trendy beverage and a virtual cure-all. Twinings, one of the most prominent names in tea, began in 1706 as a salon in London’s Strand and still has salons in as tea-serious a center as Tokyo’s Ginza.
Even on this side of the Atlantic, the tea craze was well launched by Anna’s time. By 1800, three American millionaires-to-be, John Jacob Astor of New York, Steven Girard of Philadelphia and Thomas Perkins of Boston, had also launched fleets of clipper ships that bypassed the British East India Company to trade directly with Asian tea producers.
High tea, which is a main or “meat” meal rather than a light supper, dates from about a century ago, when 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. This is probably when those super-premium sandwiches were invented and given the names of aristocratic patrons the proprietors hoped to lure in, like the Queen Alexandra sandwich of minced chicken with lamb tongue or the Queen Adelaide of ground duck, ground ham and tomato-curry spread.
These days, the menu for a typical afternoon tea includes a scone, assorted finger sandwiches, tea breads (banana, pumpkin, cranberry muffins), cookies and often chocolate-dipped strawberries. Some hotels offer either seasonally inspired or trendier sandwiches, such as smoked chicken, goat cheese, pesto and so on. Royal or queen’s tea usually includes a glass of Champagne; light tea is a smaller selection of full tea fare. Cream tea is just tea and a scone with jam and clotted cream.
Types of tea (the drink, that is)
All true teas 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 grown above 4,000 feet, are so prized. Some people believe the bush itself is actually indigenous to Tibet. Teas with small leaves, i.e., young growth, 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” 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, broken and whole leaf.
There are very fine “white teas” as well, which are made from unfermented dried tea leaf buds or tips. These teas look silvery when dried and produce a pale yellow or straw-colored-to-amber tea, and the leaves often stand on end in the cup.
Local sources of fine teas include Sailor’s Teas in Arlington Heights, 847-483-0506 or www.sailorsteas.com; and Todd & Holland Tea Merchants in River Forest, 708-488-1136 or www.todd-holland.com.
— Eve Zibart
