Tea time in New York
By Allan Roy Andrews
Stripes Former Managing Editor
First published October 15, 1995 in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan
I grew up drinking tea. No one ever left from a visit to our house without being offered a cup of tea.
Offered is the wrong word. No one ever left from a visit to our house without being prevailed upon to sit down for a cup of tea. To end a visit without a cup of tea insulted my mother as would the slamming of a door in her face.
I started drinking tea before I reached kindergarten, I think. I can't remember a time that I didn't join the family and guests for tea.
Tea held the same social honor in the homes of my aunts, cousins and near-relatives who, like my parents, were raised on the British-influenced eastern seaboard of Canada.
The importance of tea in my life resurfaced when I read about the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, visiting New York City (where my mother made most of her tea, incidentally).
Interviewed for the New York Times while he ate breakfast on the run, Archbishop George Leonard Carey drank coffee that morning, telling a reporter that back home in England he drinks tea, but in the United States ``the coffee is so good and the tea is not.''
My mother would heartily concur about America's lack of tea skills were she still alive, and having heard the archbishop, she'd have put the kettle on the stove to prepare ``a spot of tea'' for whomever happened to be near her at the time, probably saying something like, ``The archbishop should visit my house, then, if it's a good cup of tea he's looking for.''
My mother practiced a long-established ritual in preparing tea, a ritual passed on by her mother and one she attempted to instill in every tea drinker she met.
To be sure, my mother's ritual lacks the aesthetic ceremonial behavior associated with the Japanese preparation of tea, but her pragmatic rules guarantee the best tasting English tea possible.
In summary, my mother's rules, though never written by her, go like this:
1.- Use a clean kettle to boil water. Tea kettles have a way of sitting on the stove for weeks with only the change of rinse water cleaning them. My mother scrubbed her kettle, inside and out, and frequently cleaned its insides with cream of tartar.
2.- Use only cold water from the tap. This ironclad rule was emphasized because my mother, who knew little or nothing about chemicals and water supplies, thought the epitome of laziness exercised itself by using hot tap water to brew tea. I don't know the chemistry either, but tea made with hot tap water tastes awful compared to tea made with cold water.
3.- Bring the water to a rolling boil for several minutes. To guarantee the water's hotness, this rule is paramount and kept my mother from using whistling tea kettles. Such kettles begin to whistle as soon as the first steam escapes; their boil doesn't roll. When my mother made tea, steam nearly filled the kitchen as it flew from the spout of the kettle with almost the force of a steam locomotive.
4.- Always use loose tea. Teabags could disfigure my mother's face faster than a sucked lemon. In restaurants she might prefer them because she thought restaurant cooks failures at making tea, but few if any visitors were ever served tea made from a teabag in her house. In her old age she succumbed to the convenience of teabags, but by then she was rarely making her own cups of tea.
5.- Steep tea in a clean and heated tea pot. The correct word here is steep. Coffee is brewed, tea is steeped. Tea must steep in a pot for a minimum of two minutes. That was my mother's rule of thumb. Then it can be made to suit people's taste for strong or weak tea by pouring it straight or by mixing it with hot water from the kettle.
Drinking weak tea was accepted by my mother but always frowned upon. ``That's nothing more than dishwater,'' I can hear her saying to one of my aunts who preferred a hardly tinted cup of tea.
A tea strainer was optional in my mother's ritual; but before steeping the tea, the pot should be rinsed with a cupful of boiling water to prepare it for its steeping task.
6.- Keep the pot hot with a cover of some sort. Nowadays, fancy ``tea cozys'' are sewn, knitted, cross-stitched, even embroidered to be placed over a steeping teapot. My mother owned such fancy tea ware, but more often than not she'd drape a dishtowel or pot holder over the pot. The point was to trap the heat for the two or three minutes the tea steeped.
7.- Serve in a china cup. This final rule was less binding, especially when serving family and relatives, but it provided the final touch of grace that made a cup of my mother's tea one of earth's sensual pleasures and treasures.
One of my mother's prides was her collection of china cups. At the peak of her housekeeping years, she owned about 100 fancy tea cups, and many were displayed in our apartment. China cups provided a convenient source of birthday or Christmas (which, incidentally, came one day after her birthday) gifts for her.
Many in her collection were love gifts from my father. Many were from relatives and guests who spent extended times with us.
She kept each cup spotless and shining and knew without notes which cup was a favorite of every member of her family and of every person who ever drank at her table.
After my father died and she moved into a small apartment to live alone, she gradually gave away her collection to almost every woman she'd ever known. My wife has one of my mother's cups.
8.- Provide milk, sugar and lemon for the drinker's taste.
It's a shame the archbishop couldn't have visited my mother in Brooklyn. He'd have known it was possible to get a good cup of tea in the U.S.
This essay was reprinted in Connections, a publication of Annapolis Area
Christian School, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 18-19.
