Can I Make Tea with a Microwave?

I get this question often from audiences wherever I speak. It seems to be a question on the minds of a number of tea drinkers - usually novice. It was also on the mind of a reporter last month when she called for an interview on the subject for Slate magazine. If tea making is on the radar of Slate, its popularity is surely increasing! 

The simple answer is yes. You can also make tea with a Keurig coffee machine, over a campfire, or in a saucepan on the stove.

Before I answer the question from my audiences, I like to know why the seeker is searching for the answer. If the tea drinker is simply looking for a way to quickly make a hot healthy beverage, a microwave can accommodate that need. End of answer.

But if the question comes from someone who wishes to know more about tea as a lifestyle, I give them a longer answer - and a few suggestions.

It all boils down to this - a microwave will heat water but it is not one of the elements found in my tea liturgy. 

I encourage new students of tea to invest in a proper kettle and a teapot. Learning to use those two tools will change their lives and lead them into the way of tea. (A microwave is a bit cumbersome to carry along your way.) 

I sometimes offer illustrations from my former vocation as a choral conductor where I worked with young singers who asked me to teach them music. Some were simply looking for a quick and easy way to sing with little or no practice. 

Others were willing to develop the discipline needed to fully realize the unlimited musical potential within their body, spirit and voice.  They were looking for the longer answer.

And for those who were willing to go that extra mile, I filled their eager voices and fertile minds with music and ideas from the great composers and poets of the ages. They began a musical journey with me and developed a weekly discipline which honed their skills as they realized their full musical potential.  

Eventually, they sang those timeless works of art with orchestras on the stage at Carnegie Hall and in cathedrals and theaters across the country. Those classic thoughts and life-changing experiences are still alive in their souls two decades later.

From the discipline of tea, I take my cue from The Book of Tea where Okakura Kakuzo says, "Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence."

For me, a microwave represents that everyday existence. Tea - like great music - represents the adoration of the beautiful, which is what my heart longs to experience. 

Okakura called it the cup of humanity. It seems a bit blasphemous to place that divine cup into a microwave and tap boil.

I must end now for my tea kettle is whistling...

Sweet Tea Began in England

Queen Elizabeth I

Foreign dignitaries visiting the court of Queen Elizabeth I often remarked upon the shocking condition of the monarch's teeth. They were rotten, a deplorable condition aggravated by her addiction to sugar. 

But don't blame tea with sugar for her decaying teeth because she didn't live long enough to taste the exotic new herb from China.

At the opening of the seventeenth century, sugar was a rare habit only rulers and rich merchants could afford. Cones of hard brown sugar were imported via Arab traders, and eventually from South American plantations owned by the Portuguese and Spanish. It was mainly used to sweeten herbs and medicines concocted by apothecaries. That scenario changed dramatically with the arrival of a new queen,  Catherine of Braganza, and her own peculiar habit of drinking tea.

It's not clear who first advocated the addition of sugar to tea. It certainly wasn't the Chinese because, to them, that combination would be revolting. 

By mid-century, the habit of adding a spoonful of sugar to hot tea spread from Hampton Court to urban households and rural cottages. And the term teaspoon, first mentioned in an advertisement in an 1686 edition of the London Gazette, was born. 

As tea and sugar became less expensive over time, it was the working class who stirred sugar consumption to record highs. Even if you couldn't afford a meal, you could always make do with a thin slice of bread and a cup of hot tea, infused with a bit of color from a few precious tea leaves steeped multiple times and made sweet with a lump of sugar cut from a cone. 

Regency Tea Caddy with Sugar Bowl

The English addiction to sugar spilled over as well to unending amounts of tarts, pastries, jams, sponges and puddings. Eventually, what was an annual consumption of four pounds per year in 1700 jumped to eighteen pounds in 1800! 

Tea consumption kept pace as East India Company ships brought millions of pounds of Chinese teas - both black and green - into their London warehouses. 

In 1800, 30 million pounds of tea and 300 million pounds of sugar were imported to England. By the end of the century, the amount of tea had grown ten-fold and the average Englishman consumed 90 pounds of sugar each year!

Read more British and American tea history in A Social History of Tea. 

Tea Can Lift Your Mood

I discovered this humorous Grant Wood painting titled Daughters of Revolution recently while visiting the Cincinnati Art Museum. It never fails to put a smile on my face.

Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution

Wood (most known for his iconic American Gothic) stirred up considerable controversy with his satirical portrayal of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group which he called "those Tory gals." Wood's disagreement with the DAR was the result of a controversy over a World War I memorial window that the artist had been commissioned to do in the late 1920's for his hometown, Cedar Rapids.

These rather dower ladies pictured here might benefit from a few cups of tea throughout the day. The reason is an amazing amino acid called L-theanine. Discovered in 1949 in Japan, it is rarely seen in nature except in tea where it is so abundant. 

It is a neurophysiologically active (mood enhancing by stimulating alpha brain waves) compound that subtly balances and moderates the affect of caffeine. Caffeine and L-theanine together make tea unique as it both stimulates and enhances mood - just what these ladies could use!

I'll be the guest lecturer at a local DAR event next month. I might be wise to share several cups of tea with the audience before I speak because a bit of L-theanine should help put a smile on their faces!

Old MacDonald Had a Tearoom

The early third of the 20th century saw incredible growth in American tearooms. In a Saturday Evening Post article from 1938, writer Milton MacKaye perfectly described this modern social and culinary scenario from a male point of view -

Virgina MacDonald, Tearoom Pioneer

Many men—and I number myself among them— have what may be described as spinning wheel trouble. That is, when they approach an inn with a spinning wheel or a couple of green glass bottles in the front yard, they step on the throttle. Duncan Hines says that this phobia against tea rooms, as such, makes men miss a lot of good eating. Some of the best are cluttered up with antiques and collections of Aunt Sarah's quilt designs, and if one will brave the whimsy, he may find the finest type of home cooking. One of the most famous places of this character is the McDonald Tea Room at Gallatin, Missouri.

Just as Kate Cranston shaped the tearoom movement of Glasgow thirty years earlier, tea mavens such as Virginia McDonald shaped the American tea scene.  After surviving tuberculosis for seven years, and then facing the loss of her family home at the onset of The Great Depression, she mustered the strength to convert a blacksmith shop into one of the top ten tearooms in America. Before long, hungry diners beat a path to her door.

A Reviewer from The Kansas City Star reported -

Her puddings are light as summer clouds and her angel foods could be blown on a puff of a breeze. Mrs. McDonald served no beer or intoxicating drinks. Her silver was correct from the first and her china was selected from a dainty, tasteful pattern. Her linens were bright and no customer was ever expected to wipe his fingers on a paper napkin at the McDonald tearoom.

 The requests for McDonald's recipes and tearoom advice became so great that she eventually published a cookbook entitled "How It Is Done." 

You won't find any scone or lemon curd recipes within its pages, but you will find instructions for making tea cookies, marmalades, sandwiches, hearty meats and casseroles, and, of course, plentiful cakes, puddings, pies and ices. Her instructions for making iced tea were as follows:

We make our tea the cold water method. Use two ounces of orange pekoe tea to the gallon of cold water. Place tea in a loose thin bag and water in china, glass or porcelain. Let set for twenty-four hours in refrigerator. It will color up in less time but it takes this long to give it the clear brilliance of Bourbon whiskey. It never clouds nor darkens and has a fine flavor. Make Tuesday's supply of tea on Monday and thereafter each day's tea as needed.

Read more about the America's tea history in the upcoming edition of A Social History of Tea, by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson of Benjamin Press, available September 2013.

Tea Water Wells of early New York City

Peter Stuyvesant

By the time Dutch East India Company Director, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived as governor in 1647, the custom of taking tea by the burghers of New Amsterdam proved equal to that of their native Holland.The tea board, tea table, teapots, sugar bowl, silver spoons, and strainer were the pride of the Dutch household in the New World.

The early residents of Manhattan realized their tea was only as good as the water in which it was steeped. The water from dug wells in the lower part of Manhattan served well enough for ordinary domestic purpose but was brackish and disagreeable to taste. 

Sometime during the first half of the eighteenth century, a spring of fresh water between Baxter and Mulberry streets began to attract popular attention. The water was so popular for the making of tea that it was known as the Tea Water Pump. It became a regular landmark and is shown on maps and referenced in real estate deeds of the time. Other tea water pumps were located on Chatham Street and at Knapp’s spring near Tenth Avenue and Fourteenth Street.

The first mention of the Tea Water Spring appeared in the diary of Professor Kalm, a learned and observant man who visited the City in 1748. He wrote, “There is no good water to be met with in the town itself; but at a little distance there is a large spring of good water, which the inhabitants take for their tea and for the use of the kitchen.”

Shortly before the Revolution, the Tea Water Spring and its vicinity were made into a fashionable resort. A high pump with a prodigiously long handle was erected over the spring, and the grounds around it were laid out in ornamental fashion. The popular retreat became known as Tea Water Pump Garden.

The tea water from this source was so popular that it was barreled and delivered around town in carts. The distributors of this water were called “tea water men.” They would ply the streets and cry out “Tea water! Tea water! Come out and get your tea water!” These door-to-door sales carts became so numerous that they became an impediment to traffic until, on June 16, 1757, the Common Council passed “A Law for the Regulating of Tea Water Men in the City of New York.” 

By 1797, the giant pump projecting over the sidewalk and into the street, along with the continuous queue of horse drawn carts, caused such congestion that a petition for the abatement of the nuisance was present to the City Council. 

Patrons of Tea gardens in early Manhattan emulated these Georgian ladies who frequented similar establishments in London.

Eighteenth-century New York boasted two hundred tea establishments. Gardens named Ranelagh and Vauxhall, after their London counterparts, sprang up around the Lower East Side and the Bowery. The first Vauxhall garden—there were three by this name—was on Greenwich Street between Warren and Chambers streets. It fronted on the North River, affording a beautiful view up the Hudson. 

The Ranelagh, which lasted for twenty years, was on Broadway between Duane and Worth streets on the site where, later, the New York Hospital was later erected. In 1765, advertisements boasted great displays of fireworks and twice-weekly band concerts at both locations. 

The gardens were “for breakfasting as well as the evening entertainment of ladies and gentlemen.” Tea, coffee, and hot rolls could be had in the pleasure gardens at any hour of the day, and a commodious hall was erected in the Vauxhall garden for dancing. The second Vauxhall opened in 1798 near the intersection of the Mulberry and Grand streets. The third, and final, Vauxhall opened in 1803 on Bowery Road near Astor Place.

Read more about the America's tea history in the upcoming edition of A Social History of Tea, by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson of Benjamin Press, available September 2013.

Thomas Lipton's Roots in America

Sir Thomas Lipton

How did Britain's greatest tea mogul come to work on a rice plantation in South Carolina?

The front page of the October 25, 1899 Georgetown (SC) Semi-Weekly Times reported a rumor from Washington, DC that famed grocer and tea entrepreneur Sir Thomas J. Lipton was determined to invest $500,000 in tea culture in South Carolina -

Sir Thomas is familiar with the soil and climatic conditions of this State, having been at one time a laborer on a rice plantation in Georgetown County. He is now the largest land owner in Ceylon and is one of the wealthiest tea merchants in the world.

 

What were his roots in American soil?

In 1864, at the young age of 14, Thomas Lipton accumulated enough money to book a solo passage onboard a ship from Scotland to New York City. Unable to find work in that city healing from a great war, he headed south to the tobacco farms of Virginia and eventually ended up working two years in the rice fields around Charleston. In the wake of the Civil War, southern plantations often hired immigrant laborers to replace slaves. But Lipton’s wanderings in the wilderness did not last long. 

His life changed dramatically when he returned to New York City and began working for a successful grocer. By 1869, his vocation was set. And with cash in his pockets, he returned to Glasgow to take over his parents' small grocery. Within a few years, Lipton owned several of his own stores in Glasgow and London. 

In 1878, Thomas Lipton sailed to Australia with a diversion to Colombo, Ceylon. The coffee plantations on that tropical island had been decimated by fungus which killed nearly all the coffee trees. With cash in hand, he had the means to purchase five bankrupt plantations. He left funds to pay workers to rip out the dead trees, with the aid of native elephants, and plant tea bushes in their place. In a few years, the tea would be plucked and manufactured for his stores, now numbering nearly 300, back in Britain.

By growing his own tea, Lipton was cutting out the London tea auctions and the middle men. This scheme, and his trademark slogan Direct from the Tea Gardens to the Teapot, allowed a larger profit margin on his growing tea sales. A century later, Lipton Tea would account for 14% of the world tea market.

The 1888 newspaper rumor about Lipton’s plan to plant tea in the American South did not come to fruition before his death in 1931. However, the Lipton Tea Company did eventually fulfill that editor's prophecy when America's largest tea packer planted 127 acres of tea bushes on Wadmalaw Island, south of Charleston, in 1963. 

That garden, now known as The Charleston Tea Plantation, eventually came under ownership of the R. C. Bigelow Company, America’s second largest tea packer.

Read more about the America's tea history in the upcoming edition of A Social History of Tea, by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson of Benjamin Press, available September 2013.

Tea Bricks

Was brick tea thrown overboard in Boston in 1773?

Still today, I sometimes see this idea mentioned in historical accounts of the Boston Tea Rebellion.

The answer is no.

According to Okakura Kakuzo in The Book of Tea, the evolution of Chinese tea may be roughly divided into three main stages;  Boiled tea, Whipped tea, and Steeped tea. 

The Cake tea stage in which it was boiled, Powdered tea when it was whipped, and the Leaf stage (contemporary) in which leaves are steeped.

In ancient China, the tea brick, compressed tea made of  ground or whole tea leaves pressed into a block using a mold, was the most popular form of tea produced and consumed.  It was also used as a common currency for trade, or tributes, outside China. 

Coolies loading tea at Hankow

But, by the eighteenth century, the most common tea for export to Europe was tea in leaf form.  Brick tea was still available and widely used for trade, mostly with countries bordering China's northern and western frontiers.

Samuel Ball, a former inspector for the East India Company, wrote an extensive account of Chinese tea trade in 1848 which included stories of brick tea - 

I was informed that a superior kind of brick tea is made in the Bohea or Black Tea country, but for the most part it is of inferior quality from Szu-chuen, one of the border provinces adjoining Tibet.

He went on to say,

It may now be observed that the brick tea is extensively used throughout every part of Central  Asia, from the Gulf of Korea and the great wall of China on the east, to the Caspian Sea on the west; and from the Altai chain in the north, to the Himalaya mountains on the south. It is also largely used in Siberia, and somewhat in the Caucasus; in short, wherever the Calmuc and Mongolian races have extended themselves. It is meat and drink to them. It is mixed with milk, salt, and butter so that it forms more substantial diet than the fragrant fluid which smokes [steams] on our tables.

Ball recounted the story of a Russian embassy official, recorded in 1828, who spoke of frequent caravans of brick tea going from Peking to upper Mongolia. On one of the excursions, they met with a party of Bucharians with 140 camels laden with brick tea. He recalled a celebration where Chinese merchants made an offering of 350 pieces of satin and 400 chests of brick tea to the Holy Lamas. 

After two days of games, a richly decorated tent was erected and brick tea in silver cups was brought in. A cup was first presented to the holy men and then to all persons of distinction. As for those who had no cups, some of the tea was poured into their hands. Prizes were then distributed to the winners of the games, including 1000 bricks of tea to a triumphant wrestler.

Tibetan Tea Bowls

Another account in the Edinburgh Review (1818) spoke about tea habits in Tibet -

All classes of Tibetans eat three meals a day; the first consists of tea; the second of tea, or of meal porridge if tea cannot be afforded; the third of meat, rice, vegetables and bread; or soup for the lower classes. At breakfast each person drinks about five or ten cups of tea. 

About an ounce of brick tea and soda are boiled in a quart of water for an hour. It is then strained and mixed with ten quarts of boiling water and some salt. The whole is then put into a narrow churn, along with yak butter, and stirred until it becomes a smooth, oily and brown liquid resembling chocolate. It is then transferred to a teapot for immediate use.    

  

This recipe is similar to Tsampa - with the addition of barley - drunk in Tibet today.

Did the East India Company import tea bricks? Not on any grand scale. At the latter half of the eighteenth century, there were a few tea bricks in British hands, mainly as curiosities in collections such as the Museum of Asiatic Society. But brick tea was certainly not chopped and placed in the fine wooden tea caddies of polite London homes.

And in Boston, accounts of the tea rebellion include stories of tea leaves piled like haystacks alongside the ships in Griffin's Wharf while men used rakes to plow the leaves into the low tide of Boston Harbor. 

I suspect rakes would have had a hard time moving bricks of tea into the water! 

Read more about the America's tea history in the upcoming edition of A Social History of Tea, by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson of Benjamin Press, available September 2013.

 

See where the Tea Maestro will be speaking.