Making Tea

Tea was important when I was growing up in England, and nowhere more so than in my grandparent’s farm house.  You can see it in the photo above taken in very early spring, everything still dun brown and grey green. The village street and front garden are hidden by the curve of the hill.  The front of the house was added in the eighteenth century, the working part at the back went back hundreds of years before that.

That’s the background.  Now to tea.

Tea began with water.  Water was the topic of much conversation in the family.  Most of our various aunts and uncles piped water from a spring  for drinking, as we did in our farmhouse. The water from these springs was glorious, cool, limpid, and refreshing.  But mains water had come to my grandparents’ village with its added chemicals. They deemed it undrinkable, fit only for bathing, household chores, and farm animals. For drinking, they had a well dug.

So step one in tea making was to turn on the small electric pump attached to one side of the old porcelain kitchen sink facing the back farm yard.  After a few gurgles, clear, fresh well water slowly trickled in to the kettle. When it finally filled, my mother or grandmother put it on the AGA to heat.  This took a while too, partly because so much water was needed, partly because the well water was icy cold.

Step two, while all this was going on was to assemble the tea equipment: large brown tea pot, tea cozy, water jug for topping up the tea pot, strainer for collecting tea leaves, slops bowl for throwing out tea dregs, sugar bowl, and milk jug.

Step three means backing up a bit, and considering milk for the tea. My grandparents always had at least a hundred cows in milk.  But thanks to the British Milk Marketing Board’s decision to pay for milk solely by volume, not by fat content, the former herd of Shorthorns that gave medium yields of rich milk had been sent to market  and replaced with  a herd of Friesians (Holsteins) that gave plentiful quantities of a watery milk.  (They remain the major dairy cow in the temperate world).

Well, now, we couldn’t drink that kind of milk, could we?  So my grandparents had a dear little Channel Island cow that gave the creamiest milk of all the breeds.  It was a bit of an indulgence, I realize in retrospect.  An “old chap,” one of the farm workers who was now past heavy work, had to milk her by hand morning and evening.  What the cost per pint can have been I cannot even imagine.  At the time, though she was a friend, to be greeted when she was walked up the village street, her big dreamy eyes, her slobbery tongue and muzzle, her black fringed ears.

By now the kettle was boiling.   Boiling water was poured into the tea pot to warm it.  Then the rectangular colored tea caddies were taken down from the shelf over the AGA.  My grandparents bought a selection of different teas from Stokes, the grocer in the town three miles away.  Depending on their preference for the day,  different proportions were spooned from different caddies in a flat caddy spoon and added to the pot.  Then came the boiling water, and water for the water pot too, and tea cozies to keep them warm.

Then my grandmother carried the whole equipage up the couple of steps to the breakfast room (most meals were taken in the breakfast room partly because the dining room was a trek away down the back hall and up a flight of steps to the front hall, partly because the dining table served as farm office).

We children sat on the bench under the series of prints of the Grand National, with graphic renderings of falls and injuries as horses and jockeys took the huge fences.  We faced the fire on the other side of the room, flanked by two miniature barrels, one of port and one of sherry, forbidden to us children.   My grandmother sat at one end, everyone else sat in Windsor chairs around the table, never less than a dozen or so.

There was bread (and that was an even bigger story than water, but it’s for another time) and butter (hand churned from Channel Island milk), and home made scones (little flaky rounds, not the great dense hunks that now go by that name) with raspberry jam from the kitchen garden and clotted cream (thank you, once again cow), and only when we had eaten them home made seed cake or fruit cake or Victoria sponges filled with more jam and more cream and dusted with sugar.

With great ceremony, and much asking of preferences for milk and sugar, my grandmother poured tea into angular blue and white china tea cups.   Those who took milk got Channel Island milk. Not ideal, in my opinion even at that age.   Thick gobs of cream rose to the surface, making it almost like a tea-flavored dessert.  Once I had learned to drink tea without milk and sugar, it was clear and refreshingly astringent.

Only when everyone had a cup of tea, did we begin handing round the food, always in a strict order, from bread to scones, to small cakes, to large cakes. We were expected to sit, and eat, and listen, with no getting up from the table, until every one had had two or three cups of tea and completely finished eating.  Then we could ask permission to be excused and rush out to the garden that fell away in neatly groomed terraces to the meadow and river below.

Why tell this story?  Nostalgia, of course.  The fact that English farmhouse teas of the kind I assumed happened every Sunday without fail have yet to find their chronicler.  The fact that stories like this show that just perhaps Elizabeth David is not completely right that the English did not take care with their food.  The fact that taking this kind of care with the most basic ingredients, beginning with water, was a privilege that was not open to everyone.  The fact that this tea had a precise place in the social hierarchy between the high tea of the urban working classes and the afternoon tea of the upper classes. All that.

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