 |
Chinese teapot.
Photo: Elizabeth Urbach |
The Challenge: #17 -- Revolutionary Food. The theme is revolution, and it’s all about
ch-ch-ch-changes. Food can be inspired by revolution, can showcase a
revolutionary technique, or come from a revolutionary time. Give us your best
documented interpretation of revolution.
Of course, being a tea
drinker and tea blogger, I am interested in the history of tea, and I'm very
aware of the part tea played in English and American history. Although tea was advertised as early as 1658,
it was officially introduced to England in 1662, as part of the dowry of the
new Queen of England, Catherine of Braganza, who married King Charles II. A Portuguese princess, Catherine also brought
to England trading rights at all of Portugal's trading posts around the world, including
the ones where tea could be purchased.
Tea became extremely popular at court almost immediately, and spread to
the aristocracy within the first few years.
Within twenty years, the upper middle classes were also familiar with
it, and drinking it enough to provoke articles and dire warnings against it in
newspapers and the increasingly popular domestic manuals and recipe books,
aimed at the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes, as well as their
servants. By 1750 tea was being called
"unwholesome" or even "of a poisonous nature", and said to
cause "distempers, tremors, palseys, vapours, fits" and other nerve
damage, when "drank to excess;" people were encouraged to put
"cream, &c." in their tea to counteract the "corroding"
nature of the lime and alum used to make loaf sugar (when people sweetened
their tea), or to use lavender oil, nettle flowers, or quicksilver-water, in
making their tea, to "prevent the rise of vapours"! But how was the tea made?
There is some suggestion
in the earliest books, that people were drinking tea, or perhaps ordering it
ready-made, along with the other fashionably new drinks, coffee and chocolate,
in tea and coffee houses, more often than making it at home, since the recipe
books from those first 20 years don't contain any recipes for making tea. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1660 that
he sent for a cup of "tee, a China drink" one day when at home, but
it's not clear where he got the tea, whether it was made in his own kitchen, or
brought from a tea house. These tea and
coffee houses became wildly popular, rivaling taverns in their customer
numbers, but more fashionable than taverns because they sold the exotic,
expensive, imports, so they were patronized by the aristocracy and upper middle
classes, as well as anyone else who could afford the price of a cup of tea or
coffee, including women, in many cases.
Posts
