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Tea. How it Happened to an American.
When I was growing up, ‘hot tea’---so-called to distinguish it from ‘iced tea,’ which is what everyone had at every meal every day---was a drink that you had when you were ill or (if you were a girl) suffering from menstrual cramps. Seriously, that’s all it was: the cure for menstrual cramps.
My mom kept some elderly teabags in a canister for this purpose and for certain types of emotional crises.
At restaurants, you could usually order it. If you did, you got hot (but not boiling hot) water in a little tin pot, a cup with a teabag in it (usually Lipton) and a thin slice of lemon. (Americans don’t put dairy products in tea, hot or iced.) This produced a thin amber-tinted liquid, mainly lemon flavored. It was very good when you had a cold or a cough; it worked for cramps too; maybe the heat produced some sort of muscle relaxation or maybe it was completely psychological. Who knows? Not me.
I didn’t know any English people. I’d read a lot of English literature, including everything of Barbara Pym’s, so I know about ‘the endless cups of tea’ and afternoon tea and ‘tea’ meaning what in my part of the world we called ‘supper.’ But I didn’t really understand about tea.
In Barbara Pym novels---delicate little tales with a 1950’s sensibility even when attempting to grapple with 1970’s style issues---the characters talked a lot about it. China or Indian? Weak or strong? Who will ‘be mother’? ‘Oh, the benison of it,’ says one character to herself, on finally obtaining a ‘proper’ cup of tea in the strange and exotic land of Italy. Even in the anti-Pym universe of Kingsley Amis, a character who has been dehydrated by a night of too much carousing finds relief in letting tea ‘sink into his tissues.’ Ew.
In college, my friends and I considered what we called ‘Russian tea’ a great treat. You could order it at the Mayberry’s down the street, I think. I am not sure how they made theirs, but it was flavored with orange rather than lemon and very mildly with spices as well (nutmeg? cloves?) In our rooms, we used our ‘hot pots’ to make our own version out of powdered Lipton’s and Tang. (Remember Tang---the drink of choice for Astronauts? It was a strange orange-juice substitute that we all quite liked; I wonder if they still even make it). Anyway, we definitely relished that tea and tang concoction. Even the Australian friend who had gone to school in England didn’t dislike it.
And that was the only tea I really enjoyed it. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the radio show, the TV show and the book, not the ridiculous travesty from last summer in which an excellent cast was wasted) Arthur Dent nearly gets everyone killed in his desperate struggle to get the ship’s computer to understand how to emulate satisfactorily the flavor of leaves boiled in water. ‘Dying for a cup of tea, eh?” Zaphod---the real, snarky, cool Zaphod from the radio show, TV show, and book, not the shambling idiot of the recent film---says to Dent in an unfriendly tone when the computer turns out to be unable to deal with an oncoming missile because it is trying to make tea.
I laughed a lot, but I never felt the slightest desire to understand the mystique or the basis of Dent’s lifelong obsession.
My first actual real-life tea drinker was an Irishman to whom I was engaged for about five minutes. He drank Irish breakfast. He didn’t make that big a deal of it, but he made sure he got it when he ‘needed’ it. He must have offered me cups from time to time, but I’m pretty sure I declined. I don’t actually recall, though. I am sure I jeered at him for being so fussy about it. If it wasn’t him, it would have been one of the English guys I dated afterward (and I seem to have dated quite a few of them.) Hot! It must be boiling hot! Microwaving the water will not do! You must have a kettle! If you use a teabag, it must steep for the requisite period! And you must have it!
When I was in college (I think it was during that period), Celestial Seasonings came along with its many varieties of hibiscus tea and herbal tea. If we didn’t have Celestial Seasonings quite then, we certainly had Bigelow teas with different flavorings. I always found flavored tea a disappointment. When you took out the teabags, they smelled delicious but the taste never quite lived up to the scent. (I do rather like ‘Rapsberry Zinger”, “Orange Zinger,” “Cranberry Cove,” and “Orange Mandarin Spice.”) In the college dining hall, there was a rack of different-flavored teas to choose from. Some of them were pretty good. At breakfast one morning, a very charming girl whose name I can’t recall said to me, “I love this ‘Constant Comment.’ I comment on it constantly.” I had some and it was okay; I drank it for quite awhile. I lost interest in tea of any sort while I was still in college and became addicted to caffeine-infused Diet sodas (especially Diet Mountain Dew) instead.
“I don’t really care for tea,” I told one of my English boyfriends, Ivor, “but I have plenty of it here if you would like it.”
“This is not tea,” he said, inspecting the contents of the cupboard. We had to get in the car and go to the all-night grocery to get some.
“Floral muck,” said Rumcove, many years later in my life, “is not tea. Some of the women at my school drink it. It must be like drinking perfume. That’s what it smells like. It’s not tea.” Rumcove drinks tea in the morning. He craves it on waking the way my mom craves coffee. While he was visiting here, he would quite cheerfully and uncomplainingly make his own or accept what the restaurant gave him. The water was never quite hot enough, but he wasn’t too fussy about it, as long as he got it.
Nicholas, my husband, is extremely fussy about it. One of his first purchases when he moved here was an electric kettle. They’re relatively cheap now, and you can get them at Wal-Mart, but at the time, we had to buy a pretty pricey one from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.
“Fruit soup,” was his name for my sort of tea---Celestial Seasonings, Bigelow's, and the pricey stuff from Starbuck’s. I still like it and I still drink it sometimes. “Herbal muck,” he says, grimacing.
Nobody makes tea for Nicholas. His mother, a first rate cook and an expert in French cuisine, can’t make tea for him. “There’s a right way and a wrong way,” he said, “and the right way is the way that I make it.” Unlike the more tolerant Rumcove (who kindly sends care packages of English tea from time to time), he won’t order it when we go out. He uses teabags, so I don’t know what the deal is. But he makes his own. If he’s sick, he gets out of bed to make his own tea. If he were dying, he’d do it.
The water must be boiling. It must steep a certain amount of time. Okay, no, I don’t get it. How hard can it be?
“I think I’ll try some,” I said one day a few months ago. “With lemon though. I’m not going to have milk or milk-substitute in tea. Ew.”
He was surprised, but he brought me a cup. I was exhausted; I’d been up all night reading papers. I thought about what I’d read about tea ‘sinking into the tissues’ and willed it to sink into mine. It was very strong tea; he'd tried various teas that he could procure around here and decided that the storebrand for Publix supermarket is the strongest and the best. It tasted strongly of the lemon he'd put in and was very sweet. I liked it.
Later when he made tea after dinner I said I thought I’d like a cup. “Really,” he said, surprised. But he made one for me.
And so it began. I have given up coffee, soft drinks, iced tea, and everything else. Tea with lemon, provided that Nick makes it. Because I don’t understand how it can be so, but he’s right---mine just isn’t the same. I still love my Celestial Seasonings and I drink a few herbal cups a week but it doesn’t have the same effect. It’s not a craving like the tea craving.
We go through several lemons a week. My teeth are becoming tea-stained. I don’t care. I’ll use white strips. I don’t understand it; I haven’t even completely accepted it, but I am now completedly addicted. As Grayson and Mr. Cholmondely-Warner demonstrated, “Four hours without tea kills."
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Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
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