Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  By the start of summer I was home for a rest. I was exhausted, and I had stopped being able to sleep. I thought I would go mad. I couldn’t think. I felt like I was losing myself. I would run out of steam in the most inconvenient situations and suddenly have to lie down. Once, most embarrassingly, in a restaurant kitchen on a stainless-steel counter, like a morgue, baffling the chefs. I was just able to keep going, keep the business going. I didn’t think I could keep it up much longer.

  I hired a managing director, one of the best moves I’ve ever made. We took on more people, brilliant, wonderful people who love tea and believe in what Rare Tea is doing with and for tea farmers, above profits and personal gain. Eventually I started sleeping better. I finished the first draft of this book. The business grew and thrived.

  And then a year later, after spring travels through the Himalayas and down through India to Sri Lanka, I returned for another operation. Just a little one. Not too serious, no drama. Two hours under the knife and anaesthetic only floored me for a few days. A week later I was back at work. Ten days in, I went to Copenhagen. I hadn’t planned to have the surgery so close to the trip. It had been a lucky cancellation with my NHS surgeon and I gladly took the chance to get it done rather than have it hang over me like a cloud of mosquitoes. It wasn’t Africa. I’d be fine.

  I spent the day visiting all my restaurant customers, tasting teas and dishes, and walking through the sun-bright city of burnt-orange plasterwork, hollyhocks and twisting steeples under a cloudless sky. Only open wounds stopped me from jumping in the canals with the other bathers.

  I had dinner at Noma. After dinner I ran out of juice. I hit the wall of my exhaustion. I had been so happy, ecstatically happy. The food, the friends, the wine, the tea, the joy of it all. I raced into the wall as though it were clear glass I couldn’t have seen as I sprinted ahead. I went outside for fresh air and my legs softened to liquorice strands. Blood rushed from my head, my heart fluttered like a moth. I wasn’t fine.

  That was yesterday. I’m due to fly to New Orleans in five days to give a talk for this year’s Tales of the Cocktail. From there to Boston and on to New York. Then there are the edits to make to these pages, and a huge hotel opening in Shanghai. We will be selling tea in China. What would happen if the Chinese were to take Sikkim, Meghalaya, Nepal and Malawi teas to their hearts? What a revolution that might be. What a glorious endeavour. I have to go. How can I not? And you know I will love every minute of it.

  I’m not sure what will become of me, if I will find a modicum of measure. I’m stubborn. I want to be indomitable. Sometimes I remember that I am not just the Tea Lady. But I’m only beginning to discover what lies beneath.

  MAKING A GOOD CUP OF TEA

  The Tea: Leaves Versus Bags

  The good stuff is loose and lovely and will flood your life with happiness.

  While a teabag might be functional, it can never be truly wonderful. You might argue that everyone does it, but although there may be safety in numbers, these numbers are historically and culturally arbitrary. In China most people use leaf tea, just as we used to in Britain. In 1968 only 3 per cent of households in the UK used teabags, which were invented in the US in around 1905. They were considered far too utilitarian for a nation of real tea lovers. In the 1970s we became a bit obsessed with ‘future food’: white bread full of preservatives in a plastic bag; dehydrated mashed potatoes; and coffee made of granules you just needed to add water to, as if you were an astronaut. The shift to the ‘modern’ teabag was rapid, but we might be able to reverse that trend just as quickly. We’ve gone back to a preference for real bread made by a baker, coffee from beans, and actual potatoes. It’s tea’s time.

  I’ve been known to rant about the bleach and glue and waste in teabags, and especially about those ‘silken’ pyramids made of plastic that dangle menstrually over the side of your cup. Some are made with less nasty cornstarch, but in a world with limited resources it seems unnecessarily wasteful. To turn a tree into paper or corn into mesh, industrial chemicals are involved; to make it white, bleaches are used; to make it strong, there is plastic, yes, even in the paper bags.

  But people do hold that box of teabags close to their chest, and I don’t want to alienate or upset anyone. So instead let me explain the virtues of leaf tea.

  Leaves have so much to give. You can make several delicious infusions from your good leaves, not just the one exhaustive brew from a bag. You could ungallantly disparage the teabag as the floozy of the tea world: it gives it all up immediately. A tea leaf is more like a lady: she may possibly take a little longer but has far more to offer.

  Each time you reinfuse good leaf, it reveals different subtleties of flavour. For some tea, like oolong, a single teaspoon of leaves will give you six cups – each one different and more delicious than the next. A very old tea farmer in Anxi once told me:

  The first infusion is for your enemy (they discard this first quick steep, which softens and opens up the tightly furled leaves),

  The second is for your servants,

  The third is for your wife,

  The fourth is for your mistress,

  The fifth is for your business partner (because business is more important than pleasure),

  The sixth you keep for yourself.

  Loose, the leaf tea has the chance to infuse properly. Good tea leaves may be broken but they are still recognisable pieces of leaf from the Camellia sinensis bush. When they dry they shrink. As you add hot water they swell. A teabag doesn’t swell much because the tea inside is usually industrially made low-grade fannings – tiny specks of tea that are all surface area and no volume. Leaf tea has a very low surface-area-to-volume ratio in comparison to a crumb. It needs space to unfurl and allow the water to penetrate its softening surfaces. Squashed in a bag, however gauzy, or clipped into one of those metal balls, or caught inside a small infuser, it won’t have room to move and be bodily embraced by the water. And it does swell and swell and swell. A good oolong might swell to over twenty times the size of the dry leaf as it infuses. The teabags would need to be enormous to let proper tea inside brew properly.

  Multiple infusions make loose-leaf tea much more affordable than you might think when you see the little tin beside the giant box of teabags. But good tea is quite rightly more expensive. The best cheeses, olive oils and wines all cost a bit more. We understand that a good deal of skill, expertise, time, labour and care go into crafting the best flavours. They cost more to make, and we understand the value. It’s strange to think that anyone would question why tea, something we love so much, would have real value too. But even though the prices are higher, if we break it down to a cup, a very decent leaf tea is just a few pence. Far less than you might pay for a cup of coffee on the high street.

  A few pence more for something crafted with extreme care and extraordinary skill to make it significantly, gloriously more delicious is a relatively small price to pay. You might not use good leaf for every single cup, but it’s not outside the realms of possibility to have a decent pot now and again.

  Leaf tea also gives you some autonomy. It’s not patronisingly pre-measured as if we were infants or nincompoops unable to use a teaspoon. If you make tea every day, you get pretty good at establishing the perfect amount of tea you like. And you can vary the amount depending on your need and desire.

  There is a lot to love about that freedom. Before teabags, people bought the types of tea they liked. They could buy a blend or, if they wanted to, mix single-estate teas themselves, to suit their own particular tastes and the moment of enjoyment.

  The Teapot and the Cup

  It takes a few minutes to make a perfect cup of tea. But no more than that. You can do it while you’re waiting for the toast to jump. You can do it in the office when your eyes need a rest from the sucking screen. It affords you a small moment of pleasure as the leaves unfurl and soften to deliver their delight.

  In the eighth century the poet Lu Yu wrote that to enjoy a delicious cup of tea a porcelain
cup should be used, preferably beside a lily pond in the company of a desirable woman. You might prefer a gentleman. Lily ponds aren’t essential, but beautiful paraphernalia doesn’t hurt. There are few more pleasurable experiences than hand-crafted leaves carefully infused in a treasured teapot and poured into a fine-lipped cup.

  Like a wine glass, the thin lip you bring to your mouth makes your senses more tender to the precious liquid inside. Lip-feel counts for as much as the look of an exquisite cup. A wide rim allows the aromas to rise up and the tea to engulf you before you even begin to taste.

  Travelling around South America in my twenties, I stayed for a few days in a crumbling pension in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There was a glamorous, rather ravaged, older woman living in one of the rooms. She looked like Lauren Bacall, draped across a broken rattan chair in the foyer, her slim limbs always dressed in a silk negligée, her mule slippers crowned with powder-puff feathers. One afternoon she invited me into her tiny room for tea and conversation but asked me to bring my own cup. I had a blue plastic mug; she had a bone-china teacup and saucer painted with fading flowers. She didn’t have a teapot but heated the water in a cooking pot over a camping stove, added the leaves and carefully strained them into our cups through a sieve.

  Her room was neat and almost empty. Her things were carefully arranged: a silver-backed hairbrush, a Chanel lipstick, a crocodile-skin handbag, a few good dresses hanging on the back of the door, a pair of fawn suede heels. I could have packed all her belongings into my rucksack. Instead of the crumpled tat I was hefting around the continent, she held onto just a few precious items.

  She had lost almost everything, was sharing a rundown hotel with backpackers, and yet she still had some of the things that mattered to her: a constant supply of new books swapped with the passing travellers; fresh ears to whom she could tell the great tragedy of her life; and tea, drunk with dignity.

  I’ve encountered objections that making tea in a teapot might be rather tricky. If you can use a cafetière (French press), a teapot is no more complicated. People have been doing it for many thousands of years. I’m sometimes confronted with the question of what to do with the leaves once they are exhausted. Just catch them in the plug strainer or in a sieve kept in the sink. When you empty it, the leaves, uncontaminated with bleach or plastic or glue or strings or staples, are great for the compost. They can be added straight onto the earth under your roses.

  For travelling or emergencies, you can get large, unbleached, empty bags that you pop loose tea into. Choose the biggest size, big enough to fill the entire cup, to let the tea swell and move. But there is always a trace of the taste of paper. They are only an understudy for a teapot, and are best left in the wings for times of crisis. I have a trusty, unbreakable, blue enamel pot that goes with me everywhere.

  I don’t generally use silver because it’s a very active metal. If you put a silver fork in your mouth and taste it, you’ll find it has a flavour, unlike a stainless-steel one. For this reason, a stainless-steel teapot, though not as glamorous as silver, makes a better cup of tea. The silver will react with the leaf and have quite a significant effect on a delicate white leaf. If you love a strong, heady tea like a Tarry Lapsang, you will have less of a problem. Glass and ceramics are also neutral materials and good for tea. But do make sure the ceramic is glazed if you want to use it for more than one kind of tea. A porous teapot will take on the flavour of the tea you infuse in it.

  The Water

  You need fresh water, full of oxygen, to help dissolve some of the best flavours in your tea. The oxygen will have departed from any preheated, flat, listless water left in the kettle.

  If you can install a water filter under the sink, that would be ideal. The better the water, the better your tea will taste, and you’ll get fewer nasties or wafts of chlorine.

  Rather than fill the kettle right up, if you put just enough water in the kettle to make the amount of tea you need, it will always be fresh. It will also save time and energy.

  A Brief Note on Fair Trade

  I am not convinced that a logo on your packaging guarantees a good cup of tea. There is far more to fair trade than a symbol.

  I buy a crop from a farm at the price they set, not at one set by a commodity market. High-quality, hand-crafted tea is worth around twelve times more than the commodity price for industrial tea.

  When Rare Tea was Fairtrade certified the farmers got a few cents extra per kilo, but that was making little to no impact. We were paying vastly more money, the percentage of our sales price – shipped, blended and packed – to the organisation that runs Fairtrade, not the farmers. They have a very nice office in central London and huge marketing budgets. Yet the Fairtrade market is declining.

  I took the Fairtrade certification off Rare Tea and put a direct percentage of sales revenue into Rare Charity, to directly support education on the farms.

  Not wanting to get myself into scalding water, I’ll quote the farmers:

  Alexander Kay, the first Fairtrade farmer in Malawi: ‘It’s not a silver bullet.’

  Rajah Banerjee of India: ‘I believe Fairtrade is an extension of a Christian purview of seeing things. You look at someone’s act and decide this is good and this bad. What is good is then hailed as the work of God and what is bad is the work of the Devil. On these lines, Fairtrade is believed to be fair as it caters to XYZ parameters decided and endorsed by the priests of Fairtrade faith. However, I can prove that adhering to these XYZ parameters alone does not guarantee a truly fair product.’

  I would look beyond the symbols. It’s often no more than a cynical marketing strategy, promoted without true concern for farming communities. As I mentioned with regard to Nepal, the same is sometimes true of the organic certification process.

  A Note on Flavoured Teas

  I’m even less convinced that you can get a good cup of tea from something that’s been flavoured.

  The box of fruity teabags might say something like, ‘Made with all-natural ingredients … with no added sugar’, and then the ingredient list might read, ‘Black tea, natural strawberry, raspberry and other natural flavourings, hibiscus, apple pieces’.

  When you read ‘natural flavourings’ on an ingredients list, you don’t know exactly what they contain and the maker doesn’t have to tell you because they are considered trade secrets. One thing we do know is that it means something contrived in a laboratory. There is almost certainly no strawberry in ‘natural’ strawberry flavouring. Eric Schlosser put it well in his book Fast Food Nation: ‘Natural and artificial flavours are now manufactured at the same chemical plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature. Calling any of these flavours “natural” requires a flexible attitude toward the English language and a fair amount of irony.’

  I had a lab analyse a tea that tasted like strawberry sweets. It came in a beautiful tin from a famous French tea company. I wondered how it could be so sweet. The sweetness came from the fructose the lab chaps found had been sprayed onto the tea. They told me it was perfectly acceptable and legal. The ingredients list did mention there was fruit in there, and that legitimised fruit-derived sugars. But it’s crafty. And the flavour? One of the lab chaps told me plainly, ‘If you put a piece of dried strawberry in hot water, it won’t make the water taste like strawberry sweets. You need strawberry sweet flavourings to do that.’

  Flavourings will also disguise poor-quality leaf. I might not be totally out of line if I suggested that the pieces of fruit and the pretty flowers are there to distract us, baffle us, lull us into a sense of lovely, natural, pretty security. And add weight.

  I’d rather drink pure tea or herbs without anything sprayed on them. I want to know what’s in my cup and I’m happier without the drums of sticky, smelly goop that get added to the tea. I’ve seen it done at a place where I get some of my tea blended. It goes into very expensive tins, although, funnily enough, the flavourings are cheap.

  There are exceptions. Earl Grey, for instance. But that shou
ld be all about adding a pure essential oil to enhance, not disguise. I’m not saying the Russians shouldn’t add jam to their cup of tea, or the British milk and sugar. They are honest additions. You put them in yourself and you know exactly what they are.

  I used to rave on about the fact that the French don’t put flavourings in their wine, so why would they do it to tea? Until a glass of Kir Royale found its way into my hand – champagne with a dash of cassis syrup made from blackcurrants, alcohol and sugar. It’s not a flavouring or a goop made in a lab, and if it’s good enough for champagne, then who am I to argue? I stopped moaning, finally, and came up with a solution.

  If you want fruit tea, why not have real fruit tea? Together with a jam maker called Sky Cracknell, who has a brilliant company in London called England Preserves, we started making syrups. She often comes to the office with her young son, Beaches Merriweather. It’s hard not to love a woman who named her bonny, blond, blue-eyed baby after sand and blue skies. When he was very little he played happily in empty tea boxes while we experimented.

  Sky now makes me syrups that are just fruit and sugar. You add the syrup to your tea yourself, as much as you want to make you happy. And just like a Kir Royal is more delicious with good champagne, the better the tea, the better the fruit tea. The tea is left pure, which makes me happy.

  Here is one of Sky’s recipes so you can make it yourself.

  STRAWBERRY SYRUP

  1kg strawberries

  300g sugar

  Cook the strawberries, stirring initially, until they start to break and release their liquid. Then cover the pan and let them simmer on a low heat. They are fully cooked when the fruit has visually broken up.