Tea-making consigned to the dustbin of history?
IN MY LOCAL supermarket, ordinary leaf tea has now been consigned to the very bottom shelf. You have to clamber onto your hands and knees to locate a packet, as if you’re involved in the worship of some strange deity. Tea-bag tea dominates the shelves.
Making proper tea, in a pot with loose tea leaves, is now a minority pursuit. Suddenly it’s considered a bit eccentric, part of a quaint old Anglo world of kippers for breakfast and the darning of socks. When was tea-making consigned to the dustbin of history? Why did it happen?
In contemporary Australia, nothing is too much effort if you are talking about coffee. People stand there umming and ahhing about the coarseness of the grind and the darkness of the roast. They’ll willingly spend hundreds on a machine to make the stuff and will roll their eyes if anyone is foolish enough not to know the difference between a macchiato and a ristretto.
But with tea almost any effort is beyond the pale.
“Oh, I haven’t got time for that,” people will say if you ask about making a real pot of tea. It’s as if you were expecting them to don a kimono and enact the labyrinthine formalities of the Japanese tea ceremony.
Why is tea-making considered so hard? You boil water, pausing to warm the pot. You throw in three or four teaspoons of tea and then, bringing the pot to the kettle, you pour the boiling water over the tea.