flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (04/13/84)
There seems to be a lot of silly dogma and ritual about making tea properly. Actually, the only basic requirements for making Indian or Ceylon tea are: (1) use good tea; (2) have the water actually boiling when it hits the tea; (3) heat the teapot before adding the water. (I don't know about making tea in the orient.) These are easy to understand. Unless you use good tea to start with, the drink you make will not be good. Tea bags, large or small, contain what the tea packers sweep up off the floor. Buy good loose tea. The quarter-pound boxes you find in supermarkets contain mediocre quality stuff, and are expensive - $15/pound or so. Coffee specialists and gourmet shops carry much better tea at half the price. You can also order coffee and tea by mail from Simpson & Vail (53 Park Place, New York, New York), whom I've dealt with for many years. Their highest-grade darjeeling is particularly good. The chemicals that get leached out of the tea by the boiling water aren't released properly if the water has cooled much below the boiling point when the latter is added. The simplest way to ensure this is to have the kettle whistling right up to the time you start pouring. The same thing happens if the tea cools during the steeping. This is why you rinse the teapot out with boiling water just before putting the tea and brewing water in, which the British call 'scalding the pot.' The standard British canteen aluminum (or aluminium) teapot requires little heating, since you have to wait a little longer for china teapots to get hot. Tea cozies really help prevent the teapot from cooling off. Four to five minutes is about right for steeping the tea leaves. If the teapot is left standing waiting for you to pour a second cup, the tea gets cold, and also gets strong and bitter. Better to pour off the second and subsequent cups into another heated teapot, and put the cozy over that while you're drinking the first cup.