Tea at Trianon: Tea Glossary and Tea Terms of the 18th and 19th Centuries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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]

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.)