Russian tea glasses.

Russians drink tea from teacups and also thin tea glasses with a metal holder, called "podstakannik" - or glass-holder.You can find them here at "Sovetskoj Collection" catalog and web site.

The best are made of fine silver. The ones above are not and are ridiculously expensive.

If you do some serach on this forum you will find several threads on Russian tea drinking. Normally Russians drink Ceylon and Indian black teas. Nowadays Chinese and Japanese teas are getting lots of attention. Large cities have many sophisticated teaclubs with gong-fu, etc., as my friends who live there tell me. Traditionally strong black tea with sugar and lemon made with samovar was "the" Russian tea.

Sasha.

Sovietski Collection is always a bit overpriced. On the other hand, my mother bought me a set of podstakanniki from them 10 years ago, and I still use them.

You can also find them on eBay, although none of the ones I saw listed this morning included the glasses themselves.

However, I have found that they are really only good if you're having a tea break. They have very little thermal density to keep tea warm over a longer period of time. As I tend to drink slowly throughout the course of the day while sitting at the computer, my podstakanniki tend to stay on the shelf.

Sasha, tell me about Russians sometimes adding jam to sweeten their tea with, I thought I read this somewhere. What kind of jam do they use? Is there a class distinction between using a sugar lump/cube and using jam?

Melinda

People use many of these, which are more like preserves than jams. Real tea-drinkers wouldn't do that to a good tea. However there is one popular anti-cold remedy - raspberry preserve with very hot tea right before bed that makes you sweat hard while you sleep and really helps to get rid of cold and wake up and go build socialist paradise like nothing happened.

There are two ways to drink tea with sugar Russian style - just adding any type sugar to your tea and what we call "wprikusku" - sugar limp tea drinking (biting off a small piece of sugar and sip tea through it). The latter is considered to be lower class but is actually enjoyable when sweet things are in shortage (third month in Siberian taiga). But again - the real classic Russian tea is strong Ceylon with or without lemon and no sugar, but many sweet baked things - different cakes and pies (especially pies with wild berries, like a blueberry, blackberry, black and red currants, etc.). Believe me a blueberry pie with wild blueberry is nothing like the ones you find at your local supermarket. My favorite - wild cranberry (also very different from industrial variety here - it is soft and very, very juicy) and lingonberry (you can find that at your local IKEA store) - it has very complicated taste with sour and bitter undertones, very good in pies with tea. OK, OK, I an salivating drooling and need to grab a can of lingonberry jam... take care!

Sasha.

Another uniquely Russian style of low class tea drinking is to drink it from the tea cup saucer - holding it on the level with your mouth and drink the tea from it with unique noisy sound for which I have no English word. Here is a link to a Russian tea site with a gallery of paintings with tea.

To my surprise the most famous Russian tea painting (Kustodiev, Trader wife drinking tea" is not there. Here is a separate ink: Here she drinks tea from the saucer (trader's wife is no noblewoman, however rich). Take a good look at her table - this us very "Russian" style (before Communists).

Sasha.

"Slurp"?

/Lew

Exactly!

Sasha.

Vikings were always known or their rough tastes and bad manners. Can you imagine a Viking being invited by a samurai to share tea with a fellow warrior? I recently was asked to show my reaserch to a Icelander who happens to be a friend of a very close friend of mine and just sold his beer business in Russia and wanted to "better the world" with his money. He never even get back at me with a polite word of thanks, let alone return any of my confidential documents. I have no idea if this is common in Iceland today, but it definitely fits their medieval reputation. In my practice this was the first case like that.

Sasha.

Well I can't speak to that particular person, but what I experienced was, Icelanders live hard and play hard and they like to have a good time. And they live fairly well, even if everything costs at least twice as much as it does anywhere else. But yes they can be blunt at times. So can many Scandanavians. Still, it's strange living on an island where everyone nearly knows everyone else, or of them, or a relation. More like a big community.

Comparing samurai to vikingur is...well...really apples to horses really. I can see a viking woman drinking a samurai under the table quite easily though. FWIW. And as this has absolutely nothing to do with tea, lol...I'll leave it there.

Melinda..trying to get the water temp for Huang Shan Mao Feng right, grrr......

My Swedish experience was the oposite. They ere very polite and very good at accepting strangers as well as being accepted by strangers. I was very, very impressed and recall my year in Sweden with great pleasure. To imagine a Swedish businessman not getting back at you on a business matter? Absolutely impossible. Yes, they can be blunt and straightforward, but always smiling, and respectful. Honorable people, all I can say.

And as someone who came from a drinking country I say - and what is good of it? You really cannot imagine what toll does heavy drinking take on a coutry and a culture. Here in the US there is no heavy drinking (to those of yu who think there is - you are so lucky that you really have no idea...) and getting drunk and seeing people get drunk once in a while seem like "heavy fun". But believe me - its a real monster in drinking countries and a real tragedy. I lost so many of my friends at home to alchogol, educated, clever, funny, friends to the last drop of blood.... And the wrecked families, devastated children... Oh, well... Sorry.

Sasha.

Absolutely agree. And Iceland does have one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world I think.

Melinda

Sasha,

In the event that I ever fail to do so adequately again, I want to thank you for rekindling my interest in things Russian. I have begun to remember that I didn't spend 5 years studying the language because I fell in love with words that had 5 consonants stuck together. It always came back to the history, culture and people.

So thank you. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts, have been reminded of what I had forgotten, and have learned some things new.

Derek -

Where do you study and when? Where are you now? What do you do?

Sasha.

I did my undergraduate work at the University of Kentucky. I majored in Individual & Family Development and Family Resource Management. I got cheated out of a minor in Russian because, at the last minute, they told me that I couldn't use an independent study course for credit toward a minor. So when I had a year to kill before graduate school, I worked part time and completed the courses I needed to finish the degree in Russian studies.

Now, I'm in Minnesota. I have been in graduate school for the last 10 years - both MA and, currently, a stalled Ph.D. - in Family Social Science. Unfortunately, in the mean time, I lost my opportunities to practice speaking in Russian and have forgotten much of it, although I did immediately recognize the roots of "podstakanik".

I currently work from home on a contract with a local social service program to coordinate a family education program for Somali refugees in the Twin Cities. This allows us to keep our toddler at home rather than dumping him in daycare. Of course, he's also the main reason the Ph.D. stalled.

In my spare time, I like to pretend that I'm knowledgeable about tea.

We all do. :)

But where did you study in Russia and when?

Sasha.

Why would someone drink from the saucer?

(especially

Tea from samovar is always boiling hot. It does not cool down fast in large teacups. If you put it in a saucer it cools down.

Sasha.

I spent 10 years in the Southwest working and visiting reservations. If you traveled Saturday nights on back roads you drove no faster than headlights because people passed out in middle of road. I think Indians use alchohol for induced visionary stupor because of a gene.

Jim

Alex Chaihorsky wrote:

families,

Oh, that.. (Duh!)

1993. Vladimir. It was just a summer, but it was a good summer.