Earl Grey – Tea Buddy

The Royal Family shop at Fortnum & Mason, London. The Queen buys her teas here. Her Royal Highness only drinks Earl Grey.

In 1973 my sister Mithoo was at Fortnum & Mason (London’s snobbiest grocery store) promoting Indian tea when an American walked up to her and asked, “Do you have a tea that tastes like a peach?”

A Peach who wants to be a tea!! Flavored teas were unheard of in the early 1970’s. America changed all that by introducing fruity and herbal teas. Strictly speaking these teas are not “real” teas but decoctions or infusions.

My sis was stumped. She had never heard of a peach-flavored tea. You may want to remember, dear reader, this was the early 70’s when tea was still tea and a peach was still a peach and nobody ever dreamed they would become kissing cousins.

My sister suggested somewhat inanely, “Why don’t you just eat a peach, instead?” The man looked confused and walked away, leaving her equally confused. She was not trying to be clever or sass the man. You must remember the idea of a tea tasting like anything other than what it was supposed to, was absurd. Assam and Darjeeling, the two famous Indian teas had their own distinct flavors. It just was not proppa for an aristocratic beverage like tea to hobnob with fruity commoners back then.

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Not only do we now have a tea that tastes like a peach (besides a hundred other mind-boggling flavors) but for all I know we may even have a peach that tastes like a tea! We live in a blended world of crossovers and amalgamation. Anything goes.

Tea Board Girls (my sister Mithoo on the left) promoting Indian Tea at the Pontin Holiday Camp, 1973. The “tea plucker” INDIA TEA logo (seen on the bus and umbrella) was created to give Indian tea a competitive edge abroad.

Tea sampling at F&M

My sister Mithoo was a Tea Board girl. They were glamorous envoys sent out into the world to promote Indian tea. Sis travelled extensively in UK and Scandinavia doing tea promos and sampling at trade shows, summer camps and high-end retail stores. The Tea Board Girls were always in the media, hobnobbing with celebrities. It was a PR job. They created quite a stir where ever they went. A tiny town in Norway declared it a school holiday so that the kinds could come out to see the Indian beauties in their stunning sarees. They had never seen anything quite like them.

India never dreamed she would one day have to market her teas. The best tea in the world was expected to sell itself by virtue of its superiority. But that did not happen

Lion logo for Ceylon Tea

India Tea logo with tea plucker is reminiscent of the classic depiction of women in Mughal art.

Things started to change in the 1960’s and 70’s when many tea plantations came under Indian ownership. The British left India and took their tea expertise and business acumen with them. Tea exports began a downward slide and India woke up only too late to realize she was losing valuable market share to Ceylon. Ceylon Tea had marketing savvy and branded their teas with a distinctive lion logo. They gained further mileage when Lipton Yellow Label (a popular blended tea) started implementing the lion logo on their packaging. India Tea needed a brand identity and that is how the tea plucker logo came into being. Recently this logo has been criticized as being outdated and sexist. To show a woman with a basket of tea on her head implies backwardness and servility of women, according to some people. Now there are talks about rebranding Indian tea. Some marketing genius in India has suggested the visual of a peacock sipping tea. What a dreadful thought!

Here is a fun link: Lipton Yellow Label Commercial: Theanine– a caffeine like ingredient in tea–is believed to sharpen the mind. This is why some of the world’s greatest creators drink tea when they are working. Do you?

___________________________________________________

Teatime for the Firefly is Shona Patel’s debut novel. It is a love story set in a remote tea plantation in Assam, India. You can read the SYNOPSIS and the FIRST CHAPTER by clicking on the red links. Shona Patel is represented by April Eberhardt Literary.

Tea is the second most widely consumed beverage in the world after water. Half of the world’s population drinks it either hot or cold.

Tea was accidentally discovered in 2737 BC when Chinese Emperor Shen Nung found tea leaves that had blown into a pot of boiling water that produced a pleasing aroma.
Tea was introduced to England in 1669. At that time, the drink was enjoyed only by the aristocracy because a pound of tea cost an average British laborer the equivalent of nine months in wages.

Afternoon Tea was invented by Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (1783-1857), one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting. She drank tea as a picker-upper to tide over what she described as a “sinking feeling” in the afternoon.
The “High” in High Tea does not imply fancy, high class or expensive. The word actually refers to the time of day in which tea is served (evening) and that it is served at a dining room table (high table). High Tea is an evening tea generally served at 5:00 pm or 6:00 pm and features sandwiches, scones, heavy cakes, biscuits and, of course, plenty of tea.

(Please check out Lorna’a Tearoom Delights: an excellent blog about Scottish Tea Houses to whet your appetite about tea traditions still going strong in Scotland today.)

The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, by Nathaniel Currier: In 1773, colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians threw 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company into Boston harbor. They were protesting a tax on tea and a perceived British monopoly. (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)

The Boston Tea Party ended America’s liking for both the British and their tea, marked the beginning of the War of Independence, and started America’s coffee-drinking tradition.
It wasn’t until 1905 that the tea plant received its official Latin name, Camellia sinensis.This single plant can be harvested and processed to produce green, white and black teas.

250px-Charlesgrey2 — The 2nd Earl Grey, British Prime Minister of 1830 (read more about him on Wikipedia HERE)

Bergemont Orange (Citrus Bergamia) grown in Southern Italy.

Earl Grey Tea is flavored with the rind of the bergamot orange, a fragrant citrus fruit. It was named after the second Earl Grey, British Prime Minister 1830-34. Jacksons of Piccadilly claim Lord Grey handed them his recipe, based on an old Chinese version.

Iced Tea was discovered in 1904, at the St. Louis World’s Fair, by a British tea merchant named Richard Blechynden. To boost tea sales in the hot weather he placed iced cubes into his tea and found the beginning of iced tea! Today 80% of the tea served in the United States is some form of iced tea.

New York City tea importer named Thomas Sullivan invented the Tea Bag. He became annoyed at the high cost of the tin boxes he used to send tea samples to customers. So in 1904 (or by some accounts, 1908) he switched to small cloth bags. One of the New York City restaurants that received his “bagged tea” began brewing pots of tea by simply pouring hot water over the bag, and the rest is history.
The UK consumes 165 million cups of tea daily. The average person in the UK will consume around 80,000 cups of tea during their life. The Irish drink more tea per head than any nation in the world. 5 out of 6 North Americans drink tea. Americans prefer black tea over green and oolong and drink over 50 billion cups of tea each year (mostly iced tea-80%).
More interesting tea facts: courtesy Holland & Barrett
The two most hummed tea songs are “Tea for Two,” from the 1924 Broadway musical No, No, Nanette and “When I Take My Sugar to Tea,” written in 1931 by Sammy Fain Irving Kahal, and Pierre Norman. (If you want to waste more time than you are doing so already, click on the links to listen to them on YouTube).
In Tibet tea is served mixed with salt and rancid yak butter. In Burma (now Myanmar) pickled tea known as Lahpet is eaten.

tea license plates — Vanity license plates on our cars!

You can tell how much I love tea by the vanity license plates on both our cars. The ERL GREY on hubby’s car (left) is a joke. Hubby grew up in England and when he gets hoity-toity I tell him, “Just, who do you do you think you are – Earl Grey?”. He is a coffee drinker!