Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Tea Glossary and Tea Terms of the 18th and 19th Centuries

From Geri Walton:
 Samuel Pepys was the first person in Britain who documented drinking a cup tea, which he noted in his diary on 25 September 1660. At the time, it was an exotic drink and was in fact so exotic sometimes people didn’t really understand how to prepare it. A case in point is shown in the following story:
A good housekeeper received a pound of tea as a present from a friend abroad; so she called her neighbors together to partake of this great rarity, prepared indeed, in a manner truly novel. First she boiled the herb and strained off the liquor, and then served it up in a dish, after it was properly seasoned with salt, butter, and other choice ingredients. Her guests, ignorant about it as herself, enjoyed it in this state of preparation.[1]


tea glossary and tea terms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Samuel Pepys. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
When tea arrived in England, no one probably ever imagined it would turn into the national drink. However, by the mid-1700s, according to Jane Pettigrew, “tea was widely drunk amongst even the poorest families in Britain.”[2] With all the tea drinking, people began needing some way to define everything associated with it and before long, there were publications defining tea terms. There was even cyclopedia related to tea that provided all the details from cultivation and packaging it to diseases and varieties. (Read more.)
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