A Mini Class on Tea

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  As requested by Hank and some of our readers earlier in the week, I will try to dredge up some of the information from the tea master's class I took in London quite a few years ago! I do have a certificate that says I am a "Certified Tea Master," but I can't find it. Nor can I find any of my coffee table books on tea, which must have been cleared out in one book purge or another. (This is always the way of it, isn't it? As soon as you give things away, you discover you need them again...) So we will have to rely on my memory, with a bit of help from our friend the internet.

I'm going to concentrate on black tea, as herbals and tisanes are not my forte and are not technically tea. Here are some loose black teas. That's Lover's Leap on the left, English breakfast on the right, and Earl Grey on the bottom. If you look closely you can see the differences in color and texture.

Black tea is made from the oxidized leaves of the Camellia Sinensis plant. Legend has it that many years ago in China, a single leaf from the plant fell into the cup of a Chinese emperor, so the love of the beverage was born. Until the 1800s, tea was cultivated almost exclusively in China, but cultivation has now spread across more than 40 countries. 

There is so much history here that we can only touch on the barest details! (The East India Company, British colonization, the American revolution, etc. etc.!)

The most significant production of tea today is in China, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Turkey. Two of the most popular types of tea are Assam, grown in India, and Ceylon, grown in Sri Lanka. Assam has a rich, malty flavor and is most often used in "breakfast blends" like English, Scottish, or Irish Breakfast teas. Ceylon teas are a little more delicate, but are also used in the base blend for "breakfast" teas and in Earl Grey blends.

"Earl Grey" is simply a black tea blend to which is added bergamot, a distinctive citrus flavoring derived from citrus bergamia, a orange-sized fruit with a yellow-green color, thought to be a ancient hybrid between a lemon and an orange.

White and green teas are made from less oxidized Camellia Sinenis leaves, but the science of tea production is way beyond our scope here.

Loose teas are made from whole tea leaves, while teabag teas are made from smaller, broken tea particles, or "dust." While tea bags brew faster, the tea lacks the full flavor of loose tea and can often taste bitter.

Now for the fun stuff--how to make a proper cuppa! In an ideal world, you'd pour filtered water just off the boil over loose leaf tea in a warmed teapot. Let steep for at least five minutes--patience, patience! Then pour and enjoy, with or without milk. I generally drink mine unsweetened with a little milk to buffer the tannins. There is much controversy over whether the milk should be added before or after the tea, but I honestly don't think it makes much difference. If I'm pouring tea from a teapot, I put milk in first. If I'm making tea in a mug, I add it afterwards.

Loose tea in a pot, poured through a strainer, is ideal because more hot water comes in contact with the tea leaves, releasing more flavor. But I am lazy, and most often put my loose tea into a t-sac, a paper do-it-yourself teabag, and brew it right in my mug. I use the biggest size t-sac because it works in both mug and pot.

Here are some of my current favorite teas, with the t-sacs.

The tea in the center is Lover's Leap from the English Tea Store, available online, as are the Davidson's Organics. Most loose teas are available in smaller sized bags if you want to experiment with some different teas to discover which ones you like.

I've been a bit off Earl Grey lately and am drinking Lover's Leap for my afternoon cuppa. If you use loose teas, you can also blend them yourself. I generally use half Lover's Leap and half English Breakfast in the morning.

Many fancy "silk" teabags these days are actually plastic, so I don't recommend them if you're worried about injesting, or using, microplastics. Even some paper teabags have plastic sealants and binders. The t-sacs, however, are made from banana or manila hemp, a renewable material grown in southeast Asia, and are 100% plastic and chlorine free.

Here is my idea of a perfect afternoon tea, a cup of Lover's Leap with a slice of my local bakery's lemon olive oil cake!

I have many teapots, but thought the Emma Bridgewater pot with the types of teas the most appropriate!

Reddies, will you join me in a cuppa? And if you have more tea questions I'll do my best to answer them!

Beverage of Choice

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It was so heartening to see how many people responded to Hank’s check-in post a few weeks ago saying that JRW was the first thing they read while having their morning coffee or tea. But that sent me off (not unusually!) on a tangent, wondering how and why people choose what they drink.

I grew up in a perked coffee household. My mom made it every morning in the white Corningware percolator with the little blue flowers, and both parents would refill cups of black coffee throughout the day. The coffee smelled good when it was brewing, but imagine my horror the first time I tasted the bitter black liquid! I couldn’t imagine how anyone could drink such a thing, and my opinion remained firmly fixed until I lived in Mexico City the summer I was eighteen. There, coffee was the social thing, and many hours were spent in coffee shops drinking cappuccinos, although I still had to add sugar to make it palatable. It was only on trips to London in the last decade or so that I discovered the latte—along with the fact that if you drank coffee instead of tea, you spent much less time desperately searching for public restrooms, which are in short supply everywhere in the UK.

But although I drink coffee (unsweetened now) when I’m out and occasionally at home, tea is still my first, passionate love. A perfect cuppa satisfies in a way coffee does not, and most mornings I cannot wait to make that first cup.

Dearest REDS, are you coffee, tea, neither, or both? And how did you come to love your beverage of choice?

JENN McKINLAY: Coffee! So much coffee! Imagine my delight when Hooligan 2 became a barista. My morning cup is essential and I steam and froth the milk just to be fancy. Afternoons are for tea. It helps me make it through the day.

RHYS BOWEN: Need you ask, since my Facebook group is called Tea with Rhys!  Tea drinker from birth. I have to start my day with a cuppa ( made from John’s special blend of teas)  Then is coffee mid morning. Tea at teatime. And at night alternating flavors of herb teas. Well Rested. Maringa ginger turmeric depending on mood. When I am in the road I carry my own British tea bags but it’s no good unless I can get boiling water 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: There are days when the ONLY thing that lures me from my comfy bed is the knowledge that I get to have coffee. 

I often steam the milk, too, and it is transporting. I love it beyond all love. And in the summer, I love to get iced lattes. I mean–heavenly. During the day, I am Diet Pepsi, because I am out of coffee mode. Then after dinner, I always have camomile tea and half a cookie, and I am so cozy.

How? I remember, very clearly, I did not drink coffee until 1971. It just wasn’t a thing at our house. Although my father had it every morning, percolated? I wasn’t involved. 

But then, a boyfriend in Washington DC offered me coffee with cream and sugar, and because I was trying to be cool, I pretended that’s what I always drank. I was instantly–instantly!--hooked. Deliciousness! Caffeine! Sugar! Oh, I still remember that first cup. Now I don’t use sweetener, and only skim milk, but I am just as happy.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Passionate tea drinker here, which has been an uphill battle in the coffee-obsessed US. If I had a dollar for every time I ordered tea at a restaurant or diner and got a baggie alongside a tiny carafe of hot (never boiling) water… 

My mom, on the other hand, was a coffee fanatic. You could track where she had been in the house throughout the day by the half-empty cups of cold coffee she’d forget as she moved on to her next project. Ross was also a tea drinker, so we had no way to make coffee at our house, a point that was driven home when Mom stopped in at a CVS on the way to Spencer’s baptism (!!!) to buy us a Mr. Coffee machine.

HALLIE EPHRON: I like coffee and I like tea, but neither one passionately. I’m sure it’s partly because I’ve never been properly educated. Tea, for example, I don’t know how to BUY it, keep it, or brew it. I use a cone and a filter to make my morning coffee and it’s very hit or miss. 

I should love coffee – my mother always saved the last of her dinner cup of coffee, mixed in some extra sugar and cream, and gave it to me. Maybe that’s why I’m so partial to coffee ice cream.

DEBS: Hallie, glad to give you a crash tea-drinking course, anytime! I am a certified Tea Master from a course I took in London.

And did you all see that researchers are now saying that brewing tea can help remove heavy metals, including lead, from water? How cool is that!

How about it, Reddies, what do you drink, and how did you come to love it?

The Social Importance of the Tea Room by Vicki Delany

Jenn McKinlay: Lately, I've been on a sun tea bender (because Arizona!) and naturally I had to try the two favorite brands of the Brits - P.G. Tips and Yorkshire Gold. While I've enjoyed them both, I've discovered P.G. Tips does edge out the Yorkshire Gold for boldness of flavor, but that's neither here nor there. My point, and I do have one, is that today we have the fabulous Vicki Delany here to talk about her wonderful Tea by the Sea mystery series and the history of the tea room. Enjoy!

Vicki Delany: If I mention a tea room, I bet that puts you in mind of a small restaurant located in a grand hotel or a charming village. It will be decorated in either a flower pattern or pastel shades (or both), with comfortable chairs arranged around a low table, and fresh flowers on the table. Well-dressed guests, women mostly, but some men, pour loose leaf tea from fine China teapots into matching cups and nibble on crustless sandwiches, delicate pastries, and freshly baked scones served with jam and clotted cream. The conversation is light, friendly, and always polite.

Your image would be correct, in most cases, in modern times. But the history of the ‘tea room’ is more complex and meaningful than first meets the eye.

Lily Roberts, the protagonist of my Tea by the Sea series from Kensington, loves the history and traditions of afternoon tea and she was eager to explore the origins of tea rooms such as hers before she opened her traditional afternoon tea room located on Cape Cod Bay.

Book One

In order to keep up with Lily I had to do research for myself, and I was surprised to find to find a far deeper and more significant history than I was expecting.  Tea rooms, in both England and the United States, were of critical importance in the development of women’s emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This is the history that is often overlooked, particularly in the sort of high school or university courses us of a ‘certain age’ experienced, as regards groups such as women, long considered by the writers of history books as not particularly interesting or worth paying much attention to.

 

The origin of afternoon, as today can be experienced almost anywhere in the world, were anything but radical. It all began in 1840 when Anna, Duchess of Bedford, a friend and lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, felt a mite peckish late in the afternoon.  Her dinner, the main meal of the day, would usually have been served around eight o’clock, and she needed something to see her through.  I think we all can relate to that.

The hungry Anna instructed her butler to bring tea and some bread and butter, perhaps a slice of cake or pastry, to her around four o’clock.

Hardly an earth-shaking act, you would think. But it was. 

Anna decided she enjoyed this so much, she began inviting friends to join her over this afternoon tea. The friends liked the idea, fashionable hostesses leapt on the bandwagon, and the concept spread rapidly through the upper classes of British society.  As well as a ‘snack’, afternoon tea provided an opportunity for women to meet their friends in the middle of the day for company and conversation, something previously lacking in the restricted lives of aristocratic women. So popular did ‘taking tea’ become, some wealthier women created separate rooms or spaces in their gardens specifically for that purpose.  By the end of the century, middle class women were inviting friends to join them for afternoon tea in their homes.  I say ‘in their homes’ because in almost all places, restaurants and pubs and taverns were either closed to women or only allowed women in the company of a man. 

We think of the British as a nation of tea drinkers, and they are, but it wasn’t always so.  For a long time coffee reigned supreme, not just as a drink but as a center of business and political life for men of all income levels and classes who gathered in the coffeehouses. (Women were not allowed). The first coffeehouse was opened in England in 1652 and by 1739 there were over 550 coffeehouses in London alone. 

But the reign of coffee was coming to an end as tea became increasingly popular, beginning in 1662 when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza arrived in England to marry Charles II. A lover of tea, Catherine popularized it in her new country. For a long time, however, tea was a luxury only the wealthy could afford due to the high taxes on the imported beverage. Smuggling was rife and eventually the tax was slashed in 1783, destroying the smuggling trade and making tea an important part of everyday life.

Women were banned from the aforementioned coffee houses, and thus from the business being conducted there, but they made their mark on the new ‘tea rooms’.  The tea room began to be popular in the late nineteenth century as women who couldn’t afford to have a separate room in their house or a private garden area to entertain their friends looked for a socially acceptable place to enjoy a light meal and conversation in the company of only other women. 

By the beginning of the 20^thcentury, women were moving more freely through the streets of the city, out shopping and the like, but still they lacked a place to sit down and have a tea break or something to eat or to meet with their friends. The tea room provided that.  Thus the tea room quickly became a welcoming place for women. As well as having tea in such a place, owning and working in a tea room was an ‘acceptable’ occupation for a woman, at a time when there weren’t many of such.  

But even more, these tea rooms were public places for women to gather and, in many cases, talk about more than gossip and family.  They began to talk politics and specifically to organize their campaigns for the right to vote. 

The tea rooms run by the Aerated Bread Company were described as “an enormous move to freedom.”  Many tea rooms played a central part in the suffrage movement, providing meeting space where activists could meet outside their homes (and disapproving male relatives), and offer fund-raising venues.  

In the United States, the first tea rooms also provided employment for women, often in their own homes as women would open a room in their house to serve meals to travellers.  Late in the nineteenth century, these tea rooms were moved outside the private home and into the sort of separate business we’re familiar with today.  But they still provided an acceptable opportunity for business-minded single women to earn their own living or married women trying to earn some extra income. 

As in England, in the U.S., women on their own or in the company of other women were welcome in a way they still were not in restaurants. In the early Nancy Drew books, Nancy and her friends often stopped at a tea room for refreshment. This indicates that the girls were independent minded, not needing the company of a man to escort them to a restaurant. 

These days, of course, women can go pretty much anywhere we want, either alone or with women friends, and we don’t need tea rooms to preserve our reputations.  When we gather for afternoon tea it’s usually on vacation or for a special occasion.  

Next time you’re sipping your Darjeeling or Lapsang Souchong, and spreading clotted cream on a buttery scone, raise your fine China cup not only to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, but to the legions of women who had the idea of setting aside a room in their house, or opening a small space on the main street, and thus opening the door to allow women to march through. 

Readers, I’d love to know where you’ve had a memorable afternoon tea? Not your thing? What is your thing?

Book Two

National bestselling author Vicki Delany’s delightful Tea by the Sea mystery series continues, as Cape Cod tearoom proprietress and part-time sleuth, Lily Roberts, stirs up trouble when she unwittingly serves one of her grandmother’s B&B guests a deadly cup of tea . . .

 
Lily has her work cut out for her when a visit from her grandmother Rose’s dear friend, Sandra McHenry, turns into an unexpected—and unpleasant—McHenry family reunion. The squabbling boils over and soon Tea by the Sea’s serene afternoon service resembles the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Somehow, Lily and her tearoom survive the storm, and Sandra’s bickering brethren finally retreat to Rose’s B&B. But later that evening, a member of their party—curmudgeonly Ed French—dies from an apparent poisoning and suddenly Tea by the Sea is both scene and suspect in a murder investigation!
 
Mercifully, none of the other guests fall ill. They all ate the same food, but Ed always insisted on bringing his own special blend of herbal teas. So it seems, amid the whining and dining, someone snuck up to one of Lily’s cherished teapots and fatally spiked Ed’s bespoke brew, but who? Was it Ed’s long-estranged sister-in-law? Did teenage troublemaker Tyler take a prank too far? Or perhaps the family’s feuds have been steeping for longer than anyone realizes? It’s up to Lily, Rose, and their friends to get to the bottom of the poisoned pot and bag the real culprit behind the kettle murder plot.

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane. Vicki is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.  

A Nice Cup of Tea

RHYS BOWEN:

I couple of weeks ago my favorite stationary store closed. It was my go-to place for a whole range of things—the best selection of greeting cards, any size of envelope, any kind of pen, amusing little gifts for friends’ birthdays and even a tempting display of scarves, bags, jewelry. At Christmas it had crackers—the type that go bang, not the ones you eat with cheese. I’d always find what I needed and also something to surprise and tempt me.  But it couldn’t complete with Staples and Office Max where I have to buy twenty-four envelopes when I want just one.

So I find myself lamenting the last of a way of life I grew up with. The main street of small shops, each individually owned by people I knew. Granted it took longer to go to the grocer for sugar and then have to go next door to the dairy for milk. But the butcher would tell me which cuts of meat I didn’t want to buy and which I did. The fishmonger had fresh fish, delivered from that boat that morning. And the little haberdashery—well, they had everything from elastic to sewing thread to woolen undergarments. If you asked for it. They had it. And with each shop one stopped and passed the time of day.

                I still find that in some parts of England. When I visit relatives in Cornwall I love walking down the main street in Falmouth, gazing with longing at the fishmonger’s slab of lovely fish freshly caught. And the pasty shop with the smell of just baked pasties. And everyone calls you “My lovey” and has time to chat.

                It’s definitely one of the things I miss about England, although every town now has a huge hypermarket there too. But one thing that does seem to be vanishing from jolly old England is the cup of tea. It has always been the symbol of hospitality. Go to visit and the first thing the hostess used to say is “I’ll put the kettle on.” In many working class homes the tea pot sat on the hob, hot and full, all day in case somebody stopped by for a chat. And the tea stewed stronger and stronger!

                If someone was in an accident, suffering from shock, they were given a cup of tea. If someone was upset in any kind of disaster—the bombings of World War II, floods or fires,  they were given a cup of tea. It was a symbol that everything was going to be all right.

                But today’s generation doesn’t drink tea. Drive around Britain and you’ll see Starbucks and Costa’s Coffee on every corner. When we stay with people it’s coffee at breakfast. Those with leisure still have their afternoon cuppa at four, but it’s mostly older folks like us. The young have no time for leisure, or cuppas.

                Of course one can still find tea at the Ritz (for fifty pounds or so), at Brown’s and other very posh hotels. And in Devon and Cornwall they still serve the famous cream teas with local clotted cream. Yum. I’m sad to see tea dying out—both as a drink when one needs a pick-me-up and as a meal in the afternoon. To me it was the most civilized of meals—tiny cucumber sandwiches, home made scones with jam (and sometimes cream), little cakes, slices of rich fruit cake. All extra calories, I confess, but such pleasant calories with time for chatter and reenergizing. We sometimes serve tea as a treat to family and friends, but mostly they are too busy—rushing off to swim practice or karate or with too much homework. We live in a world that is too busy, too rushed, and that’s a great pity.

So what do you miss about our current lifestyle? Any nostalgia to share?