Reminiscing About Tea Times
Rachel Laudan, a historian and excellent blogger and writer who lives in perhaps my favorite place on earth (Guanajuato, Mexico), has a great post up reminiscing about her early childhood memories of tea-making. A snip, culled specifically for the Crispy audience due to its regulatory focus:
My grandparents always had at least a hundred cows in milk. But they were now all Friesians (Holsteins) because the British Milk Marketing Board paid by volume not fat content.
Well, now, we couldn’t drink that kind of milk, could we? So my grandparents had a dear little Channel Island cow that gave the most glorious rich milk. It was a bit of an indulgence, I realize in retrospect. An “old chap,” one of the farm workers who was now past heavy work, had to milk her by hand morning and evening. What the cost per pint can have been I cannot even imagine.
But if you just like evocative writing, too, there’s this:
My grandparents bought a selection of different teas from Stokes the grocer in the town three miles away. Depending on their preference for the day, different proportions were spooned from different caddies in a flat caddy spoon and added to the pot. Then came the boiling water, and water for the water pot too, and tea cozies to keep them warm.
Then the whole equipage was carried up the couple of steps to the breakfast room (they ate almost all meals in the breakfast room because the dining room filled up with farm paperwork).
I’ve got some of my own tea memories. My dad drank about fifteen cups of Salada per day from one of a variety of ample chowder-cup style mugs, two teabags per cup, steeped four minutes, with enough milk that the drink looked more milk than tea in the end. (He’s since switched to Earl Grey, but the routine’s the same.) My mom, on the other hand, takes hers with sugar in a proper teacup, one tea bag dunked fourteen times in rapid succession just after pouring so she could drink it just off the boil.
Me? I preferred coffee. (Still do.)
I don’t know Stokes or a flat caddy spoon from my arse, but all I know from reading Laudan is that I want to know them both. And the water pot and tea cozies. More here.
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