The correct way to make tea

As we drank, they told us the correct way to make tea. Maybe some of you have heard it already; boiling water (note the present tense; saying it was boiled half an hour ago is not good enough) is poured on to the right quantity of tea leaves in a warmed porcelain pot and left to “draw” for 3-5 minutes, then it is poured out into cups already containing a small amount of milk; sugar is added later, to taste. Well, if the growers of the world’s best tea say this is how to get the best flavour, who can argue with them? For some years I believed this story.

Then a Sri Lankan friend invited me to see his work among the tea estate workers around Kandy. We spent a couple of weeks comparing notes about work and catching up on memories of what had happened since we last met. One afternoon, he suggested a break; “Let’s go for a walk”. We took a bus up the mountain to Nuwara Eliya, which has a climate very like Nyanga. We walked all afternoon in the hills, most of the time in mist, and as it grew dark we came down to the village of Nuwara Eliya, found a cafe and asked for a cup of tea each. I was surprised to find that it was made exactly the way Gogo in Bikita always made tea. That started me thinking.

Over the years I have met other ways of making tea:

1. English people of a certain class follow precisely the Ceylon Tea Centre recipe. That leads me to suspect this was some kind of plot with the surviving nobles of the kingdom of Kandy to legitimise their occupation of land which they turned into tea estates after massacring the peasant owners. “We are the people who know all about tea; we have a duty to teach the world how to make tea.”

2. The Irish adopted this recipe, except they use more tea leaves to get a stronger brew, drink a lot more of it and are more careful to buy only the best tea.

3. The Americans, with a claim to know something about making tea after an incident in Boston Harbour during their War of Independence, make a weak brew with a few leaves in water that hasn’t necessarily boiled then they FREEZE it and drink it ice-cold!

4. The Indians do much as the Sri Lankan cafe owner and Gogo in Bikita except they like to add a touch of other spices, like ginger or cinnamon, to give their tea more flavour.

5. The Chinese, who were the first to domesticate the tea plant, are satisfied to drink tea made from leaves only in boiling water. They offer you two kinds: black tea, made with leaves that have been cured the way that all these already named prefer, or green tea, made with leaves which have simply been carefully dried.

6. As far as I know, the Japanese usually drink Chinese black tea, but they make a great ceremony of serving it in delicate little porcelain cups, where the Chinese happily use half-litre mugs, with lids in cold weather.

7. The Germans use the word “tea” to mean any drink made by bringing leaves of any herb into contact with hot water.

8. Further afield, things get stranger. The Russians have a special apparatus in every kitchen. I don’t know exactly how they use it. They seem to serve from it all day, but I might be wrong about this.

9. In Gaucho country, the land of the south American cowboy, they don’t use our tea plant but a local herb that grows on the pampas and many men in cities still carry a sort of jug on their belts, like their cowboy grandfathers, fill it with herb and hot water in the morning, draw a cup from it or drink from the spout, topping it up with hot water all day.

So which is correct? All of these will insist their way is best. I can see this could cause family disputes between people thrown together from very different countries. Imagine an Irish farmer marries a Japanese girl; he works all the hours of daylight in the fields, which can mean 16 hours in summer and comes home in the evening soaked to the skin (it always rains in Ireland) and chilled to the bone, expecting she has prepared a good strong brew, well thickened with milk from his own cows, well sugared and served in a pint mug. She spent the evening preparing; she sets out delicate little cups she inherited from her grandmother, changes into her best kimono and boils the tea just in time to welcome him; can she really expect him to sit on his heels and wait for a thimbleful of tea with no milk or sugar while she performs all the polite ceremonies?

Fortunately if there are any clashes like that, they get resolved quietly at home. Nobody goes to war because they don’t like the way someone else makes tea.

But aren’t a lot of the reasons people give for going to war almost as strange? Are any of the reasons we give for hating, or maybe only despising and excluding a neighbour any weightier than differences about making tea or cooking sadza?