Tea Etiquette: Reading the Leaves

"Floating tea leaves mean 'watch for strangers coming.' To tell the gender and the day of arrival, put them on the back of one hand and tap with the back of the other until they adhere - each tap is one day - and if they are soft leaves it is a woman; if hard, a man." 

The story of tea is as strange and as fascinating as any that one can read. A prehistoric event dating back some five thousand years is bound to be shrouded in many mysteries, but the exceptional qualities of tea are such that many legends developed concerning its beginnings. A highly civilized people like the Chinese considered it a special gift from heaven. In India, too, it was much the same. In Japan a special ceremony grew around it. This habit of drinking tea is the only purely Asian custom which commands universal interest. Through it the East and West have met - in a teacup! 

Its introduction had a charming influence on our Western culture, even though a great deal of smuggling and piracy helped to bring it about. Discriminating Chinese taste insisted that tea should be drunk from porcelain; and this subsequently had a tremendous effect on world trade and the voyages of clipper ships. Art, politics, and religion were all involved.

All this mystery and adventure stirred up many superstitions. Even today some tea companies attach a little saying to each teabag, such as:

"To stir tea in the pot is to stir up strife."

"Floating tea leaves mean 'watch for strangers coming.' To tell the gender and the day of arrival, put them on the back of one hand and tap with the back of the other until they adhere - each tap is one day - and if they are soft leaves it is a woman; if hard, a man." 

Fortune-telling from tea leaves is not solely a gypsy custom. Many people have read meanings into the shapes and groups of leaves that form in the bottom of the cup - how accurately is, of course, another matter. — By Patricia Easterbrook Roberts, 1967

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Clotted Cream Tea Etiquette

“This looks delicious, but it is not ‘the done thing’ to cut a scone, slather clotted cream and jam on, then put the scone back together to form a kind of bulky sandwich. Scones are broken, much like a bread roll. The scone (pronounced as in “gone” not as in “cone”) is to be eaten in a very particular way. Scones are served whole and preferably warm from the oven, and as with bread you break a scone with your fingers, and spread the jam and cream on, bite-size by bite-size piece. One should never be seen to cut a scone with a knife.” – Etiquette Teacher, Rachel North. 

According to taste.com.au, “Jam or cream first – it’s the ultimate food fight. Scones: they’re the quintessential English dessert and also the cause of a long-running (and often heated) debate around the world. What goes first? Jam or cream?…The two English counties famous for cream teas are Cornwall and Devon, and they differ on order. Cornish cream tea will do jam then cream, Devonians do it the other way around. The nation votes –To help settle the long-running debate once and for all we put it to our Facebook followers: which is the right way to eat a scone? Jam first or cream first. With over 18,000 votes in total, 17,000 of those said jam first, while only 1,000 people said cream. While it’s safe to say it wasn’t a nail-biting vote, people weren’t afraid to let their opinions be known.”

Cream Ladles

A cream ladle with a gilded bowl, used for placing clotted cream in tea, from the Gilded Age. It’s in the 1902 “Poppy” pattern by Gorham. Numerous books for identification of silver patterns and dating your flatware are available. This ladle was photographed on an old book by the late, Richard Osterberg, on sterling flatware, as I was looking at other pieces in the “Poppy” pattern.

Although warm milk was sometimes added to tea in China in the seventeenth century, when tea-drinking was taken up in England in that same century, sugar was the sole additive. The addition of milk was delayed to the early eighteenth century, ‘but... the English epicure who first tempered tea with milk remains unchronicled’. 

The milk for tea was hot during the first quarter of the century, following which cold milk was the rule. Cream was served with tea beginning in the late eighteenth century. The first receptacles for cream were pitchers or jugs with wider mouths than comparable containers for milk, to accommodate the thicker, slower-pouring liquid. There was no need for spoons or ladles.

Such utensils were needed, however, with ‘clotted cream’ (also known as Devonshire cream), which was milk heated until its cream became thick or clotted. (Clotting not only enriched the taste but helped to preserve the cream in the days before refrigeration.) 

The service of clotted cream in small silver pails became a ‘fashionable conceit’ on dessert tables in the late 1740s. The receptacles took other forms, as well, including boats supported on three or four feet and openwork baskets with liners of Bristol blue glass. Small silver ladles accompanied the containers. — William P. Hood, Jr. in 1999’s “Tiffany Silver Flatware”

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Georgian Era Tea Etiquette

Etiquette demanded that the tea should be tasted from the spoon, and that the hostess should then inquire: “Is your tea agreeable?”

“Tea Drinking a Century Ago”

as it was told in 1899

A hundred years ago it was considered a lack of courtesy to take much cream or sugar in one's tea. Etiquette demanded that the tea should be tasted from the spoon, and that the hostess should then inquire: “Is your tea agreeable?”

Modern women would be shocked by a fashionable lady of those days who cooled her tea with her breath, yet Young wrote of a certain bewildering Lady Betty: Her two red lips affected zephyrs blow, To cool the Bohea and inflame the beau; While one white finger and a thumb conspire, To lift the cup and make the world admire. – Sacramento Daily Union, 1899

 

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia©Etiquette Encyclopedia