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Many years ago I was invited to visit the Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Tea Centre in London. They advertised all the tea they grow and explained how it is processed before it reaches you and me. Finally they offered us all a cup of their best tea, which comes from Nuwara Eliya in the mountains in the centre of their island.
As we drank, they told us the correct way to make tea. Maybe some of you have heard it already; boiling water (note the present tense; saying it was boiled half an hour ago is not good enough) is poured on to the right quantity of tea leaves in a warmed porcelain pot and left to “draw” for 3-5 minutes, then it is poured out into cups already containing a small amount of milk; sugar is added later, to taste. Well, if the growers of the world’s best tea say this is how to get the best flavour, who can argue with them? For some years I believed this story.
Then a Sri Lankan friend invited me to see his work among the tea estate workers around Kandy. We spent a couple of weeks comparing notes about work and catching up on memories of what had happened since we last met. One afternoon, he suggested a break; “Let’s go for a walk”. We took a bus up the mountain to Nuwara Eliya, which has a climate very like Nyanga. We walked all afternoon in the hills, most of the time in mist, and as it grew dark we came down to the village of Nuwara Eliya, found a cafe and asked for a cup of tea each. I was surprised to find that it was made exactly the way Gogo in Bikita always made tea. That started me thinking.
Over the years I have met other ways of making tea:
So which is correct? All of these will insist their way is best. I can see this could cause family disputes between people thrown together from very different countries. Imagine an Irish farmer marries a Japanese girl; he works all the hours of daylight in the fields, which can mean 16 hours in summer and comes home in the evening soaked to the skin (it always rains in Ireland) and chilled to the bone, expecting she has prepared a good strong brew, well thickened with milk from his own cows, well sugared and served in a pint mug. She spent the evening preparing; she sets out delicate little cups she inherited from her grandmother, changes into her best kimono and boils the tea just in time to welcome him; can she really expect him to sit on his heels and wait for a thimbleful of tea with no milk or sugar while she performs all the polite ceremonies?
Fortunately if there are any clashes like that, they get resolved quietly at home. Nobody goes to war because they don’t like the way someone else makes tea.
But aren’t a lot of the reasons people give for going to war almost as strange? Are any of the reasons we give for hating, or maybe only despising and excluding a neighbour any weightier than differences about making tea or cooking sadza?
Source: https://www.thezimbabwean.co/2023/12/the-correct-way-to-make-tea/
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