Green Tea
Scald the teapot, and add one-half pint boiling water to two teaspoonfuls of the best green tea. Set it where it will keep hot, but not boil. When it has drawn fifteen or twenty minutes, add boiling water till it has the strength desired.--Mrs. J. R. McD.
Green Tea.
Scald the teapot. If you wish a pint of tea, put in one heaping teaspoonful tea after putting in a pint boiling water. Set this where it will keep hot, but not quite boil.--Mrs. S. T.
A good Cup of Green Tea.
Before putting in any water, set the teapot with the tea in it before the fire and let it get thoroughly hot. Then fill the pot with boiling water and let it stand five minutes.--Mrs. M. E. L. W.
Three contributors give three methods, and all of them treat green tea the way the period treated black tea: boiling water, long steeping, strong liquor cut with more water at the table. Modern green tea will not survive that treatment.
- Water temperature is the hingeGreen tea brewed with fully boiling water turns bitter and astringent within a minute or two, because the higher heat pulls out catechins and caffeine fast. Aim for about 175F, or let the kettle stand three or four minutes off the boil before pouring.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is far too longThe first method's long draw made sense when the goal was a concentrated liquor to be diluted, but with today's leaf it yields something harsh and metallic. Two to three minutes is standard; delicate Japanese leaf wants closer to one.
- What "the best green tea" meantIn 1870s America that generally meant Chinese gunpowder or Young Hyson, firm-rolled leaf that stood up to hard handling. Substituting a modern sencha or dragonwell into any of these three methods without shortening the steep will produce a bitter cup.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint is one cup; a pint is two. Two teaspoons to half a pint is roughly double the usual modern ratio of one teaspoon per cup, which again reflects the dilute-to-taste approach.
- Scalding the potWorth keeping. Swirling boiling water in the empty pot and tipping it out keeps the brewing water from dropping sharply in temperature against cold earthenware or silver.
- Warming the dry leafMrs. M. E. L. W.'s trick of heating the pot with the leaf in it before adding water does open the aroma, but it is easy to scorch the leaf against a hot pot wall. Keep it brief and off direct heat.
- "Where it will keep hot, but not boil"This assumed a hearth or the cool end of a range. A trivet, a tea cosy, or simply drinking it promptly does the same job; do not park a green tea on a burner.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named and initialled housekeepers in Virginia and neighbouring states, which is why the same subject appears three times over in three hands. Green tea was still a substantial part of the American tea trade in the nineteenth century, arriving from China as gunpowder, Hyson and Young Hyson, though it steadily lost ground to black teas from India and Ceylon over the following decades. The instruction to brew strong and then dilute in the pot may reflect the convenience of one brewing serving a table of drinkers with different tastes, with the kettle kept hot on the hearth. Anxieties about adulterated and artificially coloured green tea, some of it genuinely tinted with Prussian blue and gypsum, ran through the period's household literature and may lie behind the insistence on "the best green tea" here.