English tea how to?

I think most of us here would agree with this.

I find that thermoses keep tea warm, but it begins to taste a little "off" after a few hours. I've taken tea with me like this, but it's a small thermos that only holds about 2 mugfulls of tea. So it doesn't last all that long.

That's pretty much the way I've always read/heard about it being done. It makes historical sense since strainers for catching leaves existed long before our nice, fancy, plastic and metal infusers.

Modern technology might help extend the "table life" of the tea, too. We've a microwavable food warmer, which is basically a trivet designed to help keep foods warm as they sit out. It has a plastic "body" with a marble top. It would seem to me that it could be placed under a teapot to help keep the tea warm. I have to admit, I just thought of this so I've no idea if it works.

However, I'm also pretty sure that white plastic might "clash" with your nice teapot, so it might need a tea towel or doily to camouflage it.

As it was a gift, I couldn't tell you where to find them.

There is nothing wrong with decanting from brewing pot to serving pot as you do. There are nice tea pouches that cling to the rim of the pot held in place by the lid. There are also individual strainers that lay on the lid of the cup. I'd go with my two ideas if the tea pot is emptied and replentished readily. I'd go with yours if the leaves would stew in the pot while gossiping.

Jim

Rich wrote:

Have you considered a 6-Cup Chatsford Teapot? Upton Tea Imports:

Hello, Rich,

It's nice to read that someone's still making tea the traditional way! I'm guilty of neglecting it in favour of far too much gongfucha, too, so I cannot cast stones. :)

The traditional method usually involves only brewing enough tea as is required. Given the setting for two-to-three people that you mention, it's simply a matter of either selecting a smaller teapot, or using less water in a larger one that you've already bought. "One for each cup and one for the pot", a suitable amount of water for the number of people involved, and then get started on the real reason for taking afternoon tea: gossip. I've noticed that everyone from old ladies to eminent professors suffer the same failing when sitting over afternoon tea. ;)

Toodlepip,

Hobbes

But doesn't a proper host provide for a properly brewed second cup over gossip, especailly at high tea where cucumber sandwiches on pumpernickel, chicken salad with cranberry mayonaise on white, biscuits, scones, and petit fours are being served? I know I need more than 6 oz. of tea to wash all that down.

--Rich

G'day!

First of all, I don't know what pumpernickel is, but I'm going to find out, and try it out with tea this Sunday if possible. Heh. Biscuits (Highland shortbread) and scones (cream, jam) I can get behind, however. :)

Regarding the second cup, I think the crux is "properly brewed": it's usually pretty agonising to be served an overbrewed cup left lurking in the bowels of the pot, and topping up the leaves with half a quantity of water when the guests are ready seems like a good approach. Quick response, no bitterness - from neither drink nor drinker. ;)

Toodlepip,

Hobbes

It is black bread. Usually fairly fine black bread in the US or UK, rather than the coarse stuff I like.

Incidentally, I have a very good shortbread recipe if you want it. I started using rice flour in part because my wife can't eat wheat, but also because I can't get course-ground wheat flour easily and the traditional shortbread really needs to be done with stone-ground flour to be properly sandy in the mouth.

This is why the Chatsford teapots with the removable basket are so wonderful. The basket is large enough that it does not interfere with free flow to the leaves, and it can be removed taking the leaves with it once the pot is brewed. So nobody is stuck with the dregs of the pot.

--scott

To make the second, and third cup, you should have a jug of hot water as part of the tea set. You add hot water to the teapot to get more. Fiddling around putting ready-made tea into a fancy teapot will stop it being anything like a proper English tea.

Your cucumber sandwiches should be made with white bread. No mayonnaise, no pumpernickel. Scones, though, are acceptable

Lazarus

(who drank a decent cup this afternoon in a regency drawing room overlooking Green Park in London)

To make the second, and third cup, you should have a jug of hot water as part of the tea set. You add hot water to the teapot to get more. Fiddling around putting ready-made tea into a fancy teapot will stop it being anything like a proper English tea.

Your cucumber sandwiches should be made with white bread. No mayonnaise, no pumpernickel. Scones, though, are acceptable

Lazarus

(who drank a decent cup this afternoon in a regency drawing room overlooking Green Park in London)

So what keeps the second cup from being oversteeped and bitter, then? It's really not practical to try to arrange for the first steeping to be precisely enough tea for the first serving, and no more. Also, the nice, tippy Darjeeling that I like does not hold up well to multiple infusions. Switching to oolong tea would be even less properly English.

I like the flavor interest and visual contrast that the pumpernickel adds. While I am willing to defer to the English for tea advice, I prefer to get my culinary ideas elsewhere. "In Heaven, all the policemen are British, and the cooks are French. In Hell, it's the other way 'round!" -- Winston Churchill.

I agree - I don't think the English way of doing it is necessarily particularly good. I'm just saying what it is.

Once again, I'm not saying what's good, I'm saying what's part of a traditional English tea. Though on this one I'm with the English (although I'm very definitely not English myself). Their modern fashionable cuisine suffers from being far too complicated and fussy, and mixing too many flavours - not as bad as bad as the US, which to my mind has about the worst cuisine of anywhere I've been except communist Rumania (though I'm not sure iRoumanian cooking has improved much since those days).

Like American, Australian etc, English cooking lacks the grounding in good peasant food that you get in the great cuisines such as French, Italian, Middle Eastern etc..

Plain cucumber sandwiches, like bread and butter, another classical accompaniment to an English tea (I think you'll find it referred to during a tea scene in 'The Importance of Being Ernest'), are untypically very simple and very, very good.

Lazarus

But, and I'll repeat 'til I die, this isn't high tea. It's cream tea or low tea (served by Jeefes on low tables). High tea, or meat tea, is what we 'mericans call an ordinary dinner (except the that likelihood of organ meats being present is much higher), served on a high or dinner table. I doubt Queen Elizabeth every ate one.

High tea \= high culture.

Pedantic to the bone,

Rick.

Absolutely correct, Rick. I hadn't spotted the 'high tea' phrase. What you don't spell out, is that high tea is low class - or at least, to use the fine English distincions on these things, certainly not above lower middle class.

I've never heard of it referred to as 'low tea', though. Posh people would never be vulgar enough to spell out what kind of tea they were having. They wouldn';t acknowledge the existence of anything other than their own kind. Simply 'tea'.

And lower classes, used to service, would immediately know what a posh speaker meant by the word 'tea'.

Lazarus