Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  MAKING EARL GREY

  Use 2.5g of tea per 150ml cup.

  If you want to drink it milky, I would use water heated to 95°C or boiling point and infuse for about ninety seconds to two minutes. To drink it black, I would lower the temperature to 80 to 85°C and do a rapid infusion of about forty-five seconds to a minute.

  If you enjoy Earl Grey with lemon, quickly snap a strip of the rind lengthways over the surface of the cup so that the oils spray out over the tea.

  Real bergamot oil is soluble in cold water, so cold-infused iced tea made with real Earl Grey is incredible. Use just 5 or 6g per litre. The flavoured ones don’t work so well, designed as they are for the flavourings to kick off in boiling water.

  I really love a cup of Earl Grey in the afternoon with a piece of shortbread. Butter, sugar, strong black tea, a lift of citrus. It was meant to be.

  CHAPTER 14

  A DIVERSION: THE STORY OF AFTERNOON TEA

  Tea in the afternoon has been enjoyed for millennia. It would be almost inhuman not to long for a cup as the day ebbs. But what we now think of as afternoon tea is a thoroughly British invention that took shape in the middle of the 1800s around aristocrats in need of an afternoon fillip and with a desire to demonstrate their wealth and good taste.

  My earliest memories of afternoon tea have nothing to do with good taste, or even tea. That’s not all that unusual. If you read one of the many books or articles about afternoon tea, you might think tea has no place on the table at all. Tea is seldom mentioned beyond an oblique reference. The attention is given to cakes, pastries, scones and sandwiches. In the modern tradition, a glass of champagne has become the more memorable drink; the tea is there for formality’s sake.

  For me, at the start, it was Coke, at my grandparents’ house. Most Sundays, my family would drive north, in a beaten-up old yellow Ford estate, from rundown, Victorian south London to the more elegant Georgian streets of St John’s Wood. Granny was mostly upstairs in her bedroom. We called her Granny-in-Bed. As far as I understood, there was nothing physically wrong with her; she just preferred it there. Not that she was slovenly. Her hair was always neatly brushed, and her white sheets were as smooth as the tablecloth on the dining room table downstairs, set for tea.

  White-bread sandwiches with the crusts cut off sat there, curling. The cakes came from the supermarket, their sponge the colour and consistency of the thing you use to clean dishes, luridly covered in fat layers of pink icing. The tea wasn’t like the tea I would fall for at Diana’s house in Scotland, the soft Darjeeling that tasted of adventure; this was strong and bitter and scary.

  I didn’t have to have it. I was allowed Coca-Cola. It was the highlight of my week. My father had grown up in Argentina, where Granny (not in bed then) and Grandfather Horse (he had been a cavalryman) raised cattle. There in the heat of South America, father and son had become addicted to the dark, sweet drink. I loved those two men above all others, and I wanted to love what they loved, but the Coke fizzed angrily and made me sneeze. Grandfather Horse kept a large glass bottle of the stuff by his bed, where it would get warm and flat, just the way I liked it, poured into a dark green mug, black and mysterious.

  Granny-in-Bed fell down the stairs and died when I was five. I’ve always thought that justified her having stayed put. Horse died a few years later, and with him my love of Coca-Cola. I missed him, but not the teatimes. He would always slip 50p into my hand under a comic, and he was unflaggingly cheerful. But he was born into a more rigid world. He always wore a jacket, college tie and regimental buttons, even for tea with his grandchildren. My legs jiggled uncontrollably, amped as I was on sugar and caffeine. It was agony not to run. And yet I dreaded having to ask to get down, to speak up in front of everyone, over the voice-sucking expanse of tablecloth. I longed to be somewhere else. It wasn’t a terribly auspicious start.

  It’s not without irony that I tell you I am now consulted by the best hotels around the globe on how to create grand and lavish afternoon tea. I’ve come a long way from St John’s Wood. But then so has the ritual of afternoon tea itself, from its beginnings.

  It is often said that Catherine of Braganza was the first to make tea fashionable in Britain when she married Charles II. Tea is well documented as part of her dowry. But if you look deeper into the papers, there was no mention of a teapot, nor teacups or tea paraphernalia of any kind. Tea couldn’t be prepared without those precious things. She had plenty of accoutrements for making coffee and drinking chocolate, but nothing for tea. It’s debatable whether she drank it or if it was just a valuable asset in her dowry. What is certain is that tea had made its way into Britain by the seventeenth century, and those that could afford it fell for it.

  Until then, the British were a bit befuddled. They tanked themselves up on locally made ale and cider, while those with enough financial clout got loaded on imported wine. Milk was for children. Water could be lethal. And then it changed, all at once: elation came not by addling the brain to stupefaction but by stimulating it. Booze is a depressant, a soporific. For the first time, Britons began to imbibe uppers. Tea, coffee and chocolate all arrived on the beer-bleary shores of Britain in that brief moment in history when Britain was a republic (1649–60), between two Stuart kings. Perhaps those first stimulants fuelled the revolution (as they did later in Boston).

  The new drugs took their places in a rigid hierarchy, just as people did. The louche and lascivious drank chocolate. Coffee was for trade and commerce. Tea was for the cultured.

  Chocolate came from the Americas, from Mexico, an ancient civilisation whose people were at that time considered by the Christian West to be barbarous savages. Added to this, it came via Catholic Spain, with whom the Protestant British were mostly at war. The cocoa bean was believed to be a dangerous stimulant for women, turning their minds to sensuous indulgence; not just a stimulant but an aphrodisiac. The drinking of it was deeply indulgent, leading to ribaldry. It found its home in brothels, gambling dens and nightclubs, places rich men frequented for pleasure and prostitution. It was known to induce hysteria. A special saucer called a ‘trembler’ was devised to keep the chocolate cups steady in shaky hands.

  Coffee came from the Arab world, a region known for its philosophy and learning, a place with a rich culture, though not one that seventeenth-century Britons viewed as surpassing their own. It was admired, perhaps, in certain enlightened circles, but was still considered frightfully foreign and heathen. Coffee was expensive and exotic, boiled in a pot and served in little cups, but not all that sophisticated. It was found in coffee houses, where men met and did business. The once feudal, agricultural economy was moving in new directions, towards foreign trade and industrialisation. Meeting places were needed for the forging of connections and transactions that cut across rigid class barriers. Coffee houses were the new egalitarian establishments – if you were male and had sufficient funds to partake. Classes and businesses intermingled where trade was done, and ideas spread. Women were, of course, excluded, except to serve.

  The elevated position tea held over her equally hot sisters had a lot to do with her heritage and pedigree. Tea came from China. If coffee and chocolate were the harbingers of undesirable foreign influence, tea was the desirable side. China was advanced and sophisticated, the purveyor of silks and ceramics far superior to the domestic alternatives. It was a mysterious, distant land known for its art, astronomy and philosophy. With this now came tea. And with tea came the fine china in which to make and serve it, along with the elegant ceremony of preparation. Having Chinese tea, teaware and the skill to make it was a delicious demonstration of wealth, culture and refinement.

  Behind the closed doors of the grandest homes and palaces, the aristocracy indulged in all three drinks. Tea, coffee and chocolate were all consumed by the royal household. The nobility considered themselves above the rules of common society. A prostitute and a princess, in their own ways and places, could take chocolate in the presence of men. But heaven forbid that an ordinary weak-w
illed woman should try to do likewise. Coffee was consumed by both sexes at home, away from the vulgarity of trade. But it was tea that took a special place among the gentry. Here was a cup that would not tempt you into debauchery nor risk tainting you by association with squalid business, but that would instead elevate you to the zenith of sophisticated culture.

  In the homes of the rich, the precious leaf required great delicacy of preparation in extremely valuable vessels that were not entrusted to the servants. The lady of the house would keep her tea in a small locked box like a jewel case, and these were often lined with a protective coating of lead. (Those aristocrats once had lead in their make-up, lead in the pipes that ran water into their houses and lead in their tea. The effects of lead poisoning include madness.) At the table, she kept the water warm in a kettle, or later an elaborate silver samovar, set over a spirit lamp. She made her tea in tiny china pots. If you go to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, you can see wonderful examples no bigger than a modern teacup. The cups themselves were smaller still, and handle-less, and were known as tea bowls or tea dishes.

  Tea was made in tiny amounts, just enough to fill these dishes. It was infused over and over again, until every note of flavour had been enjoyed and the leaf exhausted. The delicious intimacy of being served by the lady’s own hand, from her personal collection of imported treasures, was part of the pleasure. Marc Meltonville, food historian at Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, suggests that only the queen herself would have refrained from this aspect of the ceremony, leaving it to one of her ladies-in-waiting.

  I found a bill of sale in an old family archive on the Scottish island of Bute. It dates from June 1712 and shows that the countess, Margaret Forbes, my six-times-great-grandmother, was also rather fond of tea. Just three pounds in weight of best ‘bohia’ tea cost her as much as £4 10s – thousands in today’s value.

  June 1712 bill of sale, from the Bute Archive at Mount Stuart © The Bute Archive at Mount Stuart

  This valuable commodity was shipped back to Britain from China by the great galleons of the East India Company – a perilous journey. The EIC made bulk purchases for commercial trade, but the best stuff didn’t come through the official channels. It came in precious little packages stowed in the captain’s cabin as part of the tax-exempt allowance of the ship’s officers. Margaret Forbes was probably a captain’s wife. Her exotic merchandise was not an item on the vast inventory of a grand house’s kitchen but a purchase by the lady of the house herself. It was delivered via a chain of trusted relationships: from trader to captain to the ladies in their drawing rooms, unwrapping silk parcels and exchanging small fortunes.

  Prices were kept ruinously high by the EIC. Having a complete monopoly on the tea trade, outside of those small personal transactions, allowed them to charge what they liked and to make vast profits. Added to this, the government imposed taxes of a prodigious 119 per cent, reputedly to discourage the tea-drinking habit and stem the flow of payment in precious metals from Europe to China. There were also wars to finance, and tea was an effective way of directly taxing the rich.

  But high prices only encouraged the smuggling and contamination of the precious tea leaf. Those dark sailing ships stealing into quiet coves under cover of the blackest night lit by the slightest sliver of moon weren’t just sloshing with brandy and rum, they were heavily laden with tea. When you think of Cornish and Scottish fishermen smuggling goods down silent rivers, or pirates on the high seas, it is rum to know that it wasn’t rum they were concerned with but a few dry leaves. More tea was smuggled into Britain than the taxman ever saw. Some reports claim that 80 per cent of the tea drunk in Britain during the mid-eighteenth century was illegal. We’re talking billions of pounds, in today’s currency.

  What was offered for sale, legitimately or otherwise, was often bulked up and contaminated. Sheep’s dung, for example, was used to pad out black tea, and highly toxic copper carbonate and lead chromate were used to make old green tea greener. Much as cocaine is cut to make it go further, or ecstasy is shammed from a combination of speed and tranquillisers, so tea was abused.

  Smuggling and dangerous adulteration ended when the Commutation Act of 1784 ruled that the tea tax be reduced to 12.5 per cent. Legally purchased tea became drastically more affordable and those that had the funds were now more inclined to share it, and to do so publicly.

  The established story has it that the Duchess of Bedford popularised afternoon tea in the middle of the nineteenth century. She certainly mentions the habit in letters, but it’s unlikely it was her idea alone. For the rich, lunch was served at one and dinner at eight. The servants ate first, at six, and a good household, like a good army, was said to run on its stomach. Hunger couldn’t move the meals closer. A yawning gap stretched between the two meals.

  What better time than the afternoon, when spirits flagged and there was a devil of a time to get through until dinner, to offer tea and a bite to eat? This displayed not only discerning taste and affluence but the luxury of leisure. These aristocrats were idle as well as hungry. Being able to enjoy an indolent afternoon was a sign of the great privilege of wealth and was celebrated in itself. (So different to the elevated status we now give to being unceasingly busy.) As the afternoon lagged, a dissolute lord might droop over a sofa with a cup of tea and indulge in conversation and, of course, a little gossip. Without the distraction of employment, comings and goings and to-ings and fro-ings were of as much delicious distraction as the tea itself. In eighteenth-century London, tea was known as ‘scandal water’.

  As Samuel Johnson wrote in an essay for The Literary Magazine in 1757:

  … tea is a liquor not proper for the lower classes of the people, as it supplies no strength to labour, or relief to disease, but gratifies the taste, without nourishing the body. It is a barren superfluity, to which those who can hardly procure what nature requires, cannot prudently habituate themselves. Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise and will not use abstinence. That time is lost in this insipid entertainment cannot be denied; many trifle away, at the tea-table, those moments which would be better spent.

  The lady of the house was not inclined to labour in the drawing room for a continuous succession of guests. Where she used to make one precious cup at a time, now larger volumes were needed. This removed the tea-making below stairs and required a new methodology.

  A kettle was filled with fresh water and put on to boil. This ensured the water was safe to drink. A little of the boiled water was poured into the drawing-room teapot to warm it, and the kettle left to cool slightly. They used two teapots: a smaller kitchen teapot to make the tea in, and a larger drawing-room teapot to serve it from. The first infusion was made in the kitchen teapot and then transferred to the warmed drawing-room pot. The process was then repeated for the second infusion and so on.

  In this way, several infusions of perfect tea were extracted from the leaves and decanted into the drawing-room teapot for serving. The pot containing the multiple infusions could then be taken to the drawing room and poured either by the lady of the house or the butler, depending on the formality required. It was vital to warm the drawing-room teapot before taking it upstairs to maintain the temperature of the infused tea. If you poured tea into cold porcelain, it would cool. This is the reason that British people took to the habit of warming the teapot. We have remembered to warm the pot, but not always why.

  If you are pouring good tea, straight from the teapot you made it in, into your cup, there really is no need to warm the teapot first, only to rinse it to make sure there are no leaves or stagnant water lingering within. The idea that we need to make tea at scalding temperatures is a very modern phenomenon, really just to extract any flavour from the modern industrial bag.

  As cheaper colonial tea became more widely available into the nineteenth century, the same method soon came into practice in humbler homes. The aristocrats may have been swanning around of a
n afternoon, but for working men and women tea was enjoyed at the end of the day with the evening meal. Families came together around the kitchen table and enjoyed a vast pot of tea, maybe not as good and certainly not as expensive as that served by the rich in the afternoon, but perfectly brewed, with every scrap of flavour extracted. Instead of leaving the precious leaf to stew in the pot, it was made just as it was in the kitchens of the great houses: brewed in a small pot and decanted into a larger one. Infusion after infusion carefully made and combined. The larger pot would then sit at the centre of the table, with a tea cosy on to keep it warm.

  It wasn’t until the Second World War that things changed, not just in terms of the tea available but in the way it was made. Government-issued tea was rougher and lacked the fine nuances to be delicately revealed through careful infusion. It needed high temperatures and a long brew. Public-information films featured men in white lab coats exhorting tea drinkers, in braying voices, to use freshly boiled water and a good long stew. In 1946, in the Evening Standard, George Orwell took a more literary approach and wrote an elegant treatise on how to make good tea. What he wasn’t writing was how to make fine loose-leaf tea like the pre-war duchess in her drawing room. He was talking about ration tea to people standing in the ruins of their bombed-out houses making do, keeping on.

  Better leaf benefits from gentler temperatures. If you really prefer your tea extremely hot, I do have a solution. Though you might make your tea at 85°C to extract the finest flavours, first heat your mug or cup with boiling water. You can pour your infused tea, strained from the leaf, into a scalding mug without affecting the taste. This will raise the temperature, and hopefully the tea will be hot enough as it reaches your lips. Better to pre-warm your cup rather than the pot you’re making the tea in.