Sunday was my friend Maria’s birthday, and another friend gave the most divine pavlova to the birthday girl, which we ate greedily at teatime: a chocolate-laced meringue, light and fragile and slathered with whipped cream, topped with sweet red raspberries. We also gobbled up half a chocolate mousse birthday cake, left over from the night before, and a loaf of homemade banana bread still warm from the oven, baked by Alex, the host. My favorite meal is definitely tea at 4:30 and, obviously, it’s less about the beverage than it is about the opportunity for inter-meal eating without shame or compunction.
I love tea. I’m never happier than when I’m with a circle of good friends at teatime, or in a hotel dining room seated at a small, round table and a waiter brings over one of those three-tiered silver tea-serving stands. We demand at least two types of finger sandwich, and we start referring to ourselves as “we.”
To sidle off into a seemingly random aside for just a moment, it occurs to me as I type this that the reason the queen of England refers to herself in the plural isn’t because her aristocratic grandiosity demands self-expansion, puffing herself up from the one to the many, but because she is speaking for the team: The Queen’s “we” is her nation, not herself. In my own grandiosity, that makes sense to me. The Queen, the King, oolong and orange pekoe, and a teammate feeling of collective kinship — that is the association of tea to me.
It is interesting how, in the collective unconscious of the English-speaking nations, tea and tea leaves and tea drinking have retained a fragrance of the exotic, all these centuries since an East Indiaman laden with blue-and-white china, spices, and gunpowder green tea first sailed home from the Port of Canton to England. There remains some connection, deep in our collective memory, between tea and fantasia. The aroma of the hot tea curling into the cold winter air of Northern Europe like pipe smoke. Do you remember the “Tea” dance in “The Nutcracker,” that is, the “Chinese dance” with the bouncy bassoon beat and the dancers in satin costumes and rice-paddy hats? (Certainly, this Asian stereotype of the Tchaikovsky ballet must be ripe for revision.)
Tea sets the imagination going. My daughter says that her fantasy job, if and when she doesn’t have to worry anymore about working for money, would be to open a florist shop specializing in roses, and to surround herself with their perfume, and my version of the imaginary rosy future has always been to open my own tea room. Sometimes I like to daydream about the tea room and what we would serve there. Three-tiered trays with finger sandwiches, of course, coronation chicken and watercress. What would my Main Street tea room be called? The Jubilee Tea Room? The Chatterbox? I like the idea of calling my imaginary tea room the Holiday and decorating it excessively with seasonal holiday paper goods that revolve with the year: St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, the Fourth of July. . . .
One of the most memorable high teas of my life so far was high tea on the high seas, that time in January of 2020 when my kids and I crossed to Southampton aboard the Queen Mary. It was winter storm season in the North Atlantic and we sat down in the belly of the ship every afternoon to watch other passengers woozily dance across a ballroom floor as an orchestra played “Despacito” on strings and brass and we ate piles and piles of finger sandwiches, and scones with strawberry preserves and clotted cream. The Twinings tea was secondary.
Twinings? Meh. Bigelow, better. Barry’s Tea of Prince Street, Cork? You’re getting there.
In November, I like the annual ritual, when I can afford it, of carefully examining the holiday catalog mailed out by the Mark T. Wendell tea company of Boston, and choosing gifts for friends. If you are able to participate in this mail-order ritual, it is a good year: You have friends and you have adequate affluence to afford tins of Hu-Kwa and bricks of pu-erh for Christmas from Wendell of Boston. If so, all is right in your household. Tea is well-being.
I don’t actually drink tea every day, to be honest. Maybe once a week. I’m too resolutely American; an American suffering from chronic, lifelong Anglophilia. Instead of daily tea, I drink a double espresso stirred into a cup of hot oat milk each morning, and that’s really enough caffeine for me. But my son has become a world-champion tea drinker, in emulation of his father, who was raised in Cornwall and who must have eight cups a day (always sighing and saying, “That’s better!” after each cup’s first sip). I do worry that my 15-year-old is consuming too much caffeine. He even drinks tea at night after dark, before bed, but as far as life with a teenage boy goes, there could certainly be worse mom anxieties, vice-wise.
My tea drinking is almost entirely social, not solitary. I prefer tea without milk, without lemon, and in a teacup, not a mug. Obviously, you have to pour the tea before you add the milk, if you do want milk. But you would have to be crazy to add milk to smoky lapsang, which is what rosy-hued Hu-Kwa is. If memory serves, according to something I read once in the Mark T. Wendell catalog, lapsang leaves get their smoky flavor from being dried over pinewood fires in the Fujian province. Winston Churchill drank lots of Lapsang Souchong.
More than Hu-Kwa, unlike Winston, I prefer Russian Caravan tea, which is also smoky but only slightly so. I gather we’re supposed to stop using the word “exotic,” but the associations of Russian Caravan are romantic and exotic in the extreme. In our mind’s eye, black soot and sparks lift into the starry sky above the Great Tea Road that carried the caravan from Beijing to Moscow, centuries before the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The trip took months, and the smoke from the caravan fires at dusk and dawn infused the cargo as the camels slept.