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Certain of my friends love to tell me, often accompanied by various hyberbole and superlatives, that one of their favourite cultures, cuisine-wise, is that of the noble Brits. To this comment I’m used to responding with some surprise, not unmixed with concern. Surely one of the few benefits of living in this fully globalised society – as Geography videos have informed me on a number of occasions – is the ready availability of all kinds of world-wide cuisine. By taking a three-minute walk from my house one can make a close encounter with the Italian, Vietnamese and French cultures, not to mention a chemist, a hairdresser’s, and a solicitor’s office, just in case you’re ever in the mood to get a haircut, buy some medicine and then sue the owners for your terrible haircut and unforeseen side effects. Or perhaps you can be sued, buy poison from the chemist to use on the solicitors, and then cheer yourself up with a lovely haircut. There’s a post office there too. Not sure how that fits into the equation.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that if you have free and ready access to any number of unique and exciting cultural cuisines, why would you pick British as the stand-out?* No matter what Masterchef says, there’s just no way you can make it as interesting as Thai or Lebanese food. Not only are there fewer things to eat, there are far fewer ways of preparing them. The British idea of a classy meal is to stick a few vegetables in a roasting oven, chuck a few more in boiling water and then combine all elements on a plate with an entire dead animal. Possibly battered. Maybe this is a stereotype, but stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Just look at the stereotypes of other countries’ food. Typical Italian meals are pasta sauces and pizzas; the French have frogs’ legs and croissants; Indians have complex curries and Mexicans the humble burrito. All interesting, attention-grabbing dishes. British cuisine? I have nothing to say for it.
By the time I’ve given this answer, the friend who made the original supposition about the relative pros and cons of British food has generally become bored and wandered off. Which is why I’ve never been able to talk to long enough to reach the end of my argument:
Admitting a good point.
The British Empire’s far-reaching may not have made any major improvements in world cuisine. There is one dish, however, which has reached further and become more typically British than perhaps any other in existence.
I refer, of course, to the cup of tea.
Tea may be produced in China, Sri Lanka, India, and wherever else tea comes from, but it’s always been the British that truly claimed it for their own. In Victorian times British society surreptitiously engaged in a technical illegal triangle of trade that was overlooked by authorities in a number of countries for the sake of this drink. Opium from the British colony of Bengal would be traded to Chinese black-market merchants for silver. This silver would then, in turn, be traded legally for tea from Chinese tea-merchants. This cargo would make its way to Britain, leaving everyone happy. Yes. For once, tea was actually valued more than drugs.
Tea is the ultimate drink. It’s a social adhesive – why else would ‘tea parties’ be called that? It’s the drink you automatically gravitate to when it’s cold, or you need to stay awake, or you’re just eating a really, really dry biscuit – sometimes all three. Since the holidays began I’ve been drinking an average of a cup a day. It’s also the ultimate British emblem. Forget lions or unicorns (it’s always struck me as odd that of the two animals they have on the English coat of arms, one is fictional and the other native to a completely different continent. Everyone knows unicorns come from Antarctica), tea is the all-encompassing sign of Britishness, surpassing Colin Firth, the Beatles before they all emigrated and/or died, Henry Higgins, footage of the Royal Wedding you didn’t care about at the time but that they’re nevertheless jamming down your throat three months afterwards, or those Union Jack flags they have hung up for VE day in old English cartoons. In Britan, tea takes precedence over any number of things. I’d hazard a guess that citizens spend more time over tea than, say, on religion. Everyone knows tea is the real holy water of Britain.
The point of all this verbal wanking on about tea is to make a point: tea is highly important in an up-to-date modern society and as such, it’s crucial to know how to make it correctly. To this end read below to find a special edition blogiversary five-in-one recipe (still for the same price! As in, nothing). Each specifically tailored to match certain occasions, these recipes are guaranteed to work – if not perfectly – then at least with a given amount of semi-success.
*I’m allowed to say this kind of thing because my family are British. It’s like how the only people allowed to make racist jokes without going against all boundaries of political correctness are members of the racial groups the jokes are about. Also Driver.
1. BASIC TEA
The basic cup of tea. For some minor variations, including 19th Century Tea, Common Room Tea, French Tea, and Original Tea, scroll down.
You will need:
Water
A tea bag
A cup
Milk and sugar
Biscuits
1. Boil kettle
2. Place tea bag in cup, pour boiling water in. Leave to brew for 3-5 minutes are the same length of time as it takes to sing ELO’s ‘Wild West Hero’.
3. Add milk and/or sugar to taste.
4. Consume with biscuits.
2. 19TH CENTURY TEA
For the final lesson of my 19th century literature class, we went to the school pavilion, dressed as they would have in that time had the only clothes available been ones from a dodgy costume shop in Fyshwick, and drank tea.
You will need:
Tea
Cake
Cucumber sandwiches
19th Century costumes
1. Entire class arrive, expectant of somewhat unconvincing attempt by teacher’s to make us care about subject but eager for free food. Surprisingly, only real enthusiasm is shown by one of four boys in the class. ‘What are you talking about? I wish I lived in the 19th century. Sexism!’
2. Teachers arrive, let us in. I was actually slightly late. I’d had to run from Hospitality with a box of orange-and chocolate shortbread biscuits Ness and I had created (we made up the recipe, patent pending. I may include it in a future blog post). Pavilion looks the same as normal, albeit with chairs arranged in a kind-of circle.
3. Several of us are forced into supposedly 19th century dresses. Boys get to wear suits.
4. Cucumber sandwiches are handed out. Begin a ‘being dainty’ competition with Giuseppe.
5. Throw in ‘being dainty’ competition. Instead play ‘try to fit an entire cucumber sandwich into your mouth’. I win.
6. Cake is handed out. Cake is excellent.
NB: While not all of the above is technically necessary to 19th century tea, it nonetheless adds a certain atmosphere to the proceedings, which is why I’ve included it.
7. Cups of tea are handed out in teacups. Consume. For weeks, have not tasted tea other than the kind I make in the common room with condensed milk and tepid boiling water. In comparison, 19th century tea is beyond all leaps of the imagination.
8. Giuseppe and I finish our tea, find teapots, and drain them attempting to make ourselves a new cup. It takes seven or eight different tea pots until we find one that’s full.
9. Add milk from silver jug provided.
10. Eat more cake.
11. While drinking tea, debate whether it was worth having to get dressed up and paraded around. Remain undecided.
12. Drink more tea anyway. Try dipping cake in. Decide classical biscuit-dipped-in-tea is classic for a reason.
13. Remember Hospitality biscuits.
14. Consume tea with biscuits.
3. COMMON ROOM TEA
As a Senior, someone who has access to a source of boiling water as well as tea bags and a form of milk, I’ve taken to making tea in my free periods. At the time this seemed like a good idea. Later on it didn’t seem like quite as good an idea.
You will need:
Irish Breakfast tea bag (one)
Boiling water (one cup)
Condensed milk (some)
Cheap and tacky cup with various stereotypical British pictures on it, such as Big Ben and the flag
Somebody’s pen
Driver, Vyvyan, Brandine, and the Führer (recently known as Hitler, until it led to confusion)
1. Collect Irish Breakfast tea bag, cup, and condensed milk from locker. It has to be Irish Breakfast. That is the kind of tea I drink at school. You can mess around with other crazy flavours and varieties in the comfort of your own home.
2. Place tea bag in cup, pour boiling water in. Leave for 3-5 minutes, or as much time as you can spend away from Driver, Vyvyan, Brandine, and the Führer’s conversation before they say something so completely attention-grabbing you have no choice but to walk over and inquire. Normally about 30 seconds, or between a third and a sixth of George Harrison’s ‘That’s The Way It Goes’.
3. Add liberal amount of condensed milk from tube.
NB: It was originally Aviator’s idea to bring condensed milk intead of real milk to school. It’s more portable and, given the current nightly freezing temperatures, you can keep it in your locker rather than in the overcrowded Common Room fridge.
4. Return to table.
5. Make vital choice: who to sit next to. If you choose Vyvyan she will demand a percentage of the condensed milk. If you choose Brandine she will do the same thing, as well as emptying your pencil case. If you choose Driver, you will be constantly disturbed by the things he says and the interpretive dances he chooses to illustrate these things. People in my free will know what I mean. If you choose the Führer, she will draw swastikas in the back of your folders in highlighter.
6. Decide the Führer is the lesser of four evils. Sit down next to her. Take Driver’s pen to stir tea.
7. Decide a better decision could have been made after she draws a giant swastika on the table itself and labels it ‘Heil to the Führer Leslie Harper’. More beneficial action could also have been taken regarding tea-stirring, as Driver cheerfully tells you – after you’ve used it – it’s the one he chews in class.
8. Get wet cloth. Wipe table clean.
9. The Führer draws another swastika, larger than the first. Also in a slightly more vibrant colour.
10. Get wet cloth. Throw it at the Führer’s head. Hit her in face. Watch her clean swastika off table.
11. Have cloth thrown at you by the Führer. Deflect it cunningly with arms. Return to table.
12. Lift tea to drink.
13. Spill tea dramatically over table as Führer got excited about something and attempted to jump up at the same time.
14. Get cloth.
15. Clean table, jumper, the Führer’s jumper, the Führer’s skirt, Brandine’s Maths book, and floor with cloth.
16. Notice with some satisfaction that influx of scalding tea has managed to scour remaining traces of highlighter of table. Or something. Anyway, they’re gone.
17. Consume remaining half-cup of tea without biscuits.
4. FRENCH TEA (Or THÉ FRANÇAIS)
The type of tea one can make with a cheap kettle, some free milk, and some suspiciously coloured tea bags in a small French hotel room.
Or, to be more exact, the type of tea I made with a cheap kettle, some free milk, and some suspiciously coloured tea bags in a small French hotel room.
You will need:
A kettle
A green tea bag with indecipherable French writing on it
UHT milk in one of those little containers Fry & Laurie hate
A mint
A foam cup
A handy sink
1. Enter hotel room. Decide to make cup of tea.
2. Put off making tea to visit people in other hotel room. Get stuck outside room holding kettle. This incident may be familiar to some of you from ‘Continental Drift’).
3. Get back inside room. Decide to make tea to take mind off first horrifying and traumatic getting-lost-moment of trip.
4. Take kettle into tiny bathroom. Attempt to fill it up from sink.
5. Notice sink is ridiculously tiny and is, in fact, far too small to contain large item such as kettle. Convey water from sink to kettle with foam cup.
6. Put kettle down on flat, handy surface. Decide against using bed. Use miniscule desk instead. Be careful of stability of desk.
7. Ignore previous instruction.
8. Clean up water spilled in horrendous tripped-over-luggage-on-to-desk-causing-kettle-to-fall-off incident, as it will be known in your head from then onwards. Be glad kettle had not boiled. Be even gladder that nobody was watching but characters in French soap opera you tuned in to accidentally and were focussed on when you walked around the room, missed your luggage and tripped over it flailing madly.
9. Refill kettle using foam cup method. Consider patenting bright idea. Decide against it.
10. There are two types of tea bag on the complimentary tray, brown and green. Reason that green is environmentally friendly, rip it open, and place delicately in cup, completely failing to either read or comprehend the labels in French. Attempt to smell tea bag in attempt to determine its type: unfortunately, sense of smell is so poor can detect nothing more than pleasant tea-like odours.
11. Pour hot water on top of tea bag in foam cup. Leave for 3-5 minutes or the same lenth of time as it takes to darkly mutter the line from the end of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall – Part 2’ eighty times. Do not let whoever you’re sharing a room with come in and find you staring at a kettle muttering ‘Ow can you ‘ave any puddin’ if you don’ eat yer meat?’ in a terrible Scottish dialect. Don’t. It sounds funny. It wasn’t.
12. Remove tea bag, dispose of it in bathroom dustbin. Discover tea is a slightly different shade to the colour tea normally is. Decide to ignore it.
13. Add UHT milk. Tea goes a charming pale green colour which would be perfectly pleasant were it anywhere else than in the liquid you’re hoping to drink.
14. Try tea.
15. So that’s what thé au menthe means.
Decide never to mix peppermint herbal tea with milk again. Or ever drink herbal tea again. This experience has essentially ruined it for you.
16. Do what was, in hindsight, the stupidest thing so far. Reluctant to get rid of tea entirely, decide to make it more palatable by adding sugar. Being unable to find sugar, you find a complimentary chocolate covered mint instead.
D’you want to guess what happened next?
17. Drop mint into tea, stirring optimistically for several minutes or the same length of time as it takes to warble as many verses of ‘Hallelujah’ as you can remember. The Jeff Buckley version, I don’t like Leonard Cohen. Although it’s somewhat difficult to tell given the standard of my singing. Sometimes it’s difficult even to tell what song I’m having a go at.
18. Cheerfully try a sip of tea.
19. Empty tea into sink. Rinse cup thoroughly. Rinse sink thoroughly. To be sure, throw away cup in bathroom bin and empty kettle.
20. Hotel roommate points out that the brown tea bags were the normal ones. Not only that, but there were packets of both normal sugar and artificial sweetener (and the labels weren’t even in French. Convenient for phenylketonurics such as the late and great Egg Zagar) hidden under them. Also discover the vital packet of biscuits.
21. Vow never to make tea under such circumstances again. That, or learn to think.
22. Consume biscuits without tea.
5. ORIGINAL TEA
This is more a long-term project than a simple cup of afternoon tea. Nevertheless, connoisseurs may be interested in trying it.
You will need:
Land in China, Sri Lanka, India or other tea-growing country (some)
Tea-plant cuttings
A cargo plane
A cow
A sugar cane plantation (optional)
Forest (at least one)
A tea pot
A tea cup
Biscuits (packet of)
1. Purchase land in profitable tea-growing area. Plant tea bushes. Hire team of underpaid native workers to care for your tea bushes in the two to three years it will take them to mature and sprout tea leaves of their own.
2. When tea has fully grown, buy a cargo plane. Use your underpaid native workers to pack plane thoroughly with tea leaves. Fly plane to Britain. While it is not integral to the recipe that you be in Britain, it will add a certain ambience to the atmosphere that would otherwise be lacking.
NB: Pack plane efficiently. While it is cheaper to ask your workers to do it without boxes, piloting a plane above the Atlantic ocean is difficult enough without majestic waves of loose tea soaring wantonly about with the air-conditioning. Although, theoretically, plunging your plane full of tea leaves into the sea will give you the largest cup of tea ever created by mankind, the excitement of the moment may be dampened by you being in the tea. And the sea.
3. To make black tea, leave the tea leaves to wilt and then dry them quickly. Crush them, leave them to oxidise, and then store them in vacuum container. Possibly purchase some kind of tea-preparing machine. Or, if your resources have been exhausted by the consecutive acquisition of land, human souls, tea leaves and a cargo plane, simply hire one for an hour. Prepare the handful of tea leaves you expect to use for your pot of tea. The other three hundred and ninety nine crates of tea you’ve brought over with you from the tea-growing nation of your choice are surplus to requirements. You probably should have thought of that before you started.
4. Put the tea leaves aside while you prepare the other elements of your pot of tea.
5. The next step depends on the individual choice of the person in question. Personally, I drink tea with milk and no sugar. However, I’ll incorporate both milk and sugar into the recipe in order to keep all parties happy. For the bizarre few of you who drink tea with lemon, feel free to purchase your own lemon tree. Or don’t. It’s a weird thing to do. I mean, why lemon? Why not vinegar or something? You don’t hear of people drinking tea with vinegar in it, do you? And yet lemon is seen to be normal?
6. Find a cow. Either yours or somebody else’s.
7. Learn how to milk a cow.
NB: If you’re using somebody else’s cow, there may be very little opportunity for you to actually learn how to milk a cow. In this case I would suggest that you wing it. How hard can it be? Baby cows manage it. Aren’t you smarter than a baby cow?
8. Milk the cow. (If you chose to go with the above step, that of ‘winging it’, step 8 should be followed by step 8.5: Run madly with milk from furious cow. Breaking your leg while frantically trying to escape over fences could be a major hindrance, as (a) it will reduce your tea-making abilities and (b) the cow will eat you).
9. Refrigerate milk and store tea leaves. Now, to move on to obtaining the sugar.
10. Buy a sugar cane plantation.
11. Remove several stalks of sugar cane and build a sugar-processing machine.
12. Realise sugar is incredibly difficult to create and is a job best left to professionals. Go to your local IGA. Find a bag of sugar. Smuggle it out by hiding it under your jumper. Or maybe in the cast on your broken leg.
13. Find a forest of rare and priceless trees.
14. Cut trees down, burn them to create enormous fire upon which to heat your water. Technically cutting down the entire forest is not entirely necessary, but lends your tea-making a definite style.
15. Find mountain spring of pure and natural water.
16. Put pure and natural water in Tupperware jug. Heat over giant tree furnace.
17. On second thoughts, using Tupperware was a stupid idea. Instead use something that doesn’t melt when exposed to heat.
18. Get tea pot and infuser (i.e. something that looks like this):
19. Place tea leaves in infuser, add boiling water. Leave to soak for 3-5 minutes or the length of time it takes to sing The Smiths’ ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ three times.
20. Remove tea leaves from infuser. If you enjoy that kind of thing, tip some of them back into the pot to enable you to predict your own future with the tea leaves. It will probably have something to do with you being arrested for felling a priceless forest, mistreating third-world workers, abusing animals and stealing a packet of sugar, and your plane-licence being seized. Just a hunch.
21. Pour tea into cup, add milk and sugar to taste.
22. Nip down to the shops to buy a packet of biscuits. Seeing as you’re in Britain, you should buy some Jammy Dodgers. I recall them being excellent, as well as being the 11th Doctor’s biscuit of choice.
23. Drink expensive, delicious tea. Have ethical debate with yourself and, when they arrive, the police, as to whether it was worth it or not.
NB: Check milk is not off before you pour it in. That would be the kind of waste that makes you want to stab somebody in the eye in frustration and exasperation as soon as you realise, and given the police are already coming around that’s not the frame of mind you want to be in.
24. Consume tea with biscuits.
