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A Cup of Tea
First, let the water (stale water will not make good tea) come to a boil, merry boil, but not long enough to lose its vitality. Scald out the teapot. Allow one teaspoonful of tea for each person, and if several persons are to be of the party, allow "one for the pot." Pour on only enough water to steep the tea thoroughly-the teapot is not to be half filled with water which will be cold before the tea is served. While the tea is "drawing," set on fresh water to boil. Reboiling water or allowing it to simmer and simmer, deprives it of those gases which give life and sparkle to the drink. Soft water, for some reason, makes far the best tea. As to the kind of tea to be used, that is left to each one's personal preference. Japan, Formosa blended with green, or orange Pekoe are the most delicately flavored, but many prefer English Breakfast, or the Ceylon or India teas. In this as in everything else, the best economy is in having a thoroughly good article. Let your hand prepare and let your friends partake of, with all its delicate aroma, unimpaired "that gentle excitant, a cup of tea," "the beverage of the intellectual."
The method here is sound and still the standard for black tea; only the vocabulary and a few of the tea names need translating.
- "Merry boil," not a long oneWater at a full rolling boil, used the moment it gets there. The book's concern about "vitality" is really about dissolved gas, which does affect the taste; long-boiled or reboiled water tastes flat.
- One teaspoon per person, plus oneRoughly 2-3 g of leaf per cup. Modern loose-leaf guidance is the same, though today's finer-cut blends brew stronger, so err on the light side with a supermarket black tea.
- Scalding the potSwirl boiling water in the empty teapot and tip it out. A cold pot pulls heat out of the water as soon as it is poured, so warming it first helps keep the brew up to temperature; it also rinses the pot out.
- Steeping timeThe original gives none. Three to five minutes for black tea; two to three for green or Formosa oolong, and green in particular turns bitter past that.
- Concentrate, then diluteThe instruction to add only enough water to steep the leaf, with fresh water boiling alongside, suggests brewing a strong pot and lengthening it with fresh boiling water, though the book does not say so outright. Either way, it keeps the leaf from over-extracting while the pot sits.
- Soft waterThe reason the author could not supply: hard water's calcium and magnesium mute the flavour compounds and throw the dull scum you see on the surface. Filtered water gives a noticeably brighter cup.
- The tea names"Japan" and "Formosa" are Japanese green and Taiwanese oolong; "orange Pekoe" is a leaf grade, not a flavour, though on modern shelves the term is often used loosely for black tea generally. English Breakfast, Ceylon and Indian teas are all still sold under those names.
Tea etiquette of this kind filled the beverage chapters of American household books from the 1880s onward, when tea was cheap enough to be an everyday drink but still carried enough social weight to be got wrong in company. The list of teas helps date the page: Japanese and Formosa leaf held a large share of the American market in the late nineteenth century, and Ceylon and India teas were the newcomers, promoted hard by British planters, before they largely displaced green tea in American cups. The closing quotations are the period's stock phrases for tea as a respectable stimulant, set against coffee and against alcohol; "the beverage of the intellectual" has no settled author. The insistence on freshly boiled water is not sentiment but observation, and modern brewing guidance still calls for water freshly brought to the boil.