My late mother didn't just pour hot water into her tea pot. She boiled it on the stove. Now my wife does the same thing. You can imagine all the boiled catechins and quercetin just turning the whole mess thick , black and very bitter !
My mother's introduction has meant that tea is my beverage of choice. As luck would have it, health-related literature now is full of praise for this potion.
It's claimed that after water, tea is the most consumed liquid in the world. And there isn't just one taste. Tea can be, like my mum's, bitter, or suggests notes of sweet, nutty, floral, or grassy flavours, or as someone said somewhere, "astringent."
Studies indicate that the likely single place of origin for this shrub is the northern part of Myanmar bordering the Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of China. Tea drinking started as a medicine. In many places in China it was called "cha". In fact in Malaysia the Chinese still use this word. The Japanese call it "ocha". The Hokkien of the south coast of China called it "teh" and the Europeans adopted the various versions of the word "tea" to this day. In England to have tea has sometimes been simplified to having "a cuppa."
Carper gives a chapter in one of her books the title "The Ancient Longevity Drink." It's tea. She says this extraordinary drink, made from the leaves of Camellia sinesis, is blessed with antioxidants, and is from the fountain of youth, if ever there is one. She refers to studies, and quotes comments praising the goodness of tea and its various medicinal attributes. In another book Carper says an International Scientific Conference in New York in 1991 said tea protects arteries by influencing blood-clotting factors. There are several other references of the benefits of tea-drinking in the same book, enough to support the proposition that tea-drinking is good for everybody.
Portugese priests and traders were the earliest recorded to have shipped tea from Macao to Java in 1607. The Dutch East India Company was the first to ship tea from Hirado, Japan, to Europe. Tea drinking, expensive and upper-class, became fashionable in the Hague, and the Dutch later introduced it to the Germans, the French and shipped it to New Amsterdam, New York. Tea was sold, in of all places, "coffee houses" in London in 1657. By the 19th. century, tea became an everyday beverage for all levels of society of Europe.
The British introduced tea planting to India to break the Chinese monopoly. The first production was in Darjeeling in 1856, from plants brought from China. An endemic variety was found in Assam, which completely replaced the Chinese variety.
As a side note, tea has also played politics. In fact the very beginning of the creation of the great United States of America was celebrated with a tea party, the" Boston" one ! But that needs a different story.
We, in Malaysia, talk of our own popular "teh tarik" (pulled tea). I found out that Malaysia is not the inventor. Apparently, in North Africa, such as in Algeria and Morocco, long ago they had learned to pour hot tea from height. It was to create different flavours, pouring from different heights, ostensibly because of the aeration effect. But really, as in this country, it's probably to allow for quick consumption of the drink, because warm climate doesn't allow for quick cooling. I remember in Mecca, I had to wait forever for my glass of "susu" (the Arabs selling tea around the Holy Mosque use this word for tea with milk), the temperature being maybe around 35 degrees celcius.
Drink tea by all means , but "teh" (tea in Malay) must be used carefully in this country. Very different connotations are carried when uttered with different intonations, and in different situations. "Minum teh" (drink tea) means taking a break, or sitting down for chit-chat. But "duit teh" (tea money) is a bribe you give a government official for favours ! It's not my cup of tea, but I saw an inscription on Raja Alias' office door years ago that said " Life is like tea, it depends on how you make it."
I make mine with milk and no sugar.
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