I’m not much of a tea drinker (but like every German, I own a Stövchen, @Pardel-Lux 
), I don’t like black or green tea very much and almost only ever drink fruit or herbal tea. But I’m a big coffee drinker (with a shot of milk and a little sugar), and all the times the milk curdled in my coffee, the milk was always bad.
Same here, unless green tea, in which case i add a little sugar ( I do not care for green tea). Like a 1/4 little pack.
But I do like lemon in black tea. No sugar, no milk. I prefer iced tea.
In the “Small Change” series by Jo Walton, the protagonist is found out to be gay as he likes lemon in his tea rather than milk and sugar. i.e “girls way”. I have great doubts. (Okay, that isnt the only evidence, but…)
Brits claim that the water must be boiled in a tea kettle or electric kettle, that microwaved heated water tastes wrong- again I have doubts.
Yeah, always use “coffee” when referring to Starbux.
They may have a point if their contention is that the scaling adds flavour. If so, then it must be a well-used kettle that has never been cleaned (i.e.- descaled). Since Brits are known to consume certain items of “food” that are inedible and technically not even food – such as jellied eel or black pudding – the scaling theory is plausible.
I like bitterness in lots of things, including well-made tea. But, I don’t like the bitterness of oversteeped tea. I suppose that if there’s a pot of oversteeped tea in the house, I could try a tiny smidge of salt to see if it makes it drinkable for me. It might make the astringency just come forward more though, which is also an unpleasant component of oversteeped tea for me.
The idea of using salt to counter bitterness is certainly not new – my grandmother used to put salt on grapefruit.
Ugh. To me, Starbucks’s drip coffee is awful. I’d get an Americano instead.
Public service announcement: Curdling has also been known to happen with fresh milk, in cases where a not-too-bright tea drinker has used the teapot and teacup for a citrusy (i.e., acidic) herbal tea and then not bothered to wash the vessels out before using them for ordinary milk-enhanced black tea.
At least, so I hear. (whistles nonchalantly)
I drink a lot of tea, about 48 ounces per day. I clean my tea maker fairly regularly (it is clear glass and stainless steel, so I can see when it needs it), and use tap water, which is pretty palatable where I live. I use a Fellow brand 16-ounce wide-mouth thermos mug to drink from, which keeps the tea inside hot for hours if the lid is on. I drink only black teas, some flavored, some not. I always add a splash of whole milk and two packets of Stevia, and they all taste good to me. Although since the Stevia can leave a tiny bitter aftertaste, I’m considering trying the pinch-of-salt thing.
I add the hot tea to the cold milk, but when I am out and about, and get a tea at Starbucks, they add the cold milk to the hot tea. In neither case has my milk ever curdled. (Except once or twice, when milk that was just on the cusp of becoming undrinkable actually turned when I poured the tea over it). I suggest to anyone who has curdling happen that their milk was bad before they put it in the tea.
I’ve never been to Britain, so I’m curious whether the tea served in tea shops is as bad as the tea people apparently make at home (as described above)? I love the idea of tea shops, where you can sit around and gossip with your friends for the price of a pot of tea. Or do they still do that?
Whatevs. Better than McD’s for me.
Hell yeah, or at least they did the last time this American tourist was in a British city, a few years ago.
Heck, nowadays we have some tea shops in the US even.
When I was maybe 8 years old, I got tea at a restaurant, and I couldn’t decide between lemon or milk and sugar. So I decided I’d do both. My mom told me it would curdle, but I didn’t really know what that was. I very quickly learned.
There is fresh milk. There is milk that’s gone off. And in between, there’s milk that will break if poured into hot water. If your milk is in between, heating it might keep it from breaking and I’ll let people argue over how using such milk affects the taste.
I once worked in a crepe bistro. The sugar and half-n-half were always on the table. At the end of the night, we’d test each creamer of half-n-half with a big cup of hot water. If it broke, it would be dumped. If it didn’t, it would be saved for the next day.
(My bold)
Ahem…:
Being British I suppose I ought to robustly defend something or other - but hell, pile as much salt in as you like. I don’t drink tea - perhaps six cups in the last two decades, all drunk to appease a tea-enthusiastic host who bought in Lady Grey specifically for me, so I felt I had to. Black no sugar. Or salt.
Oh, absolutely, but they sell things other than tea, of course - black coffee, thank you. No sugar. There’s been quite a renaissance of these places recently. Actually there’s a spectrum from tea room through cafe to coffee shop where you can get coffee, tea, chocolate, soft drinks (and snacks). The emphasis is different depending on where you are on that spectrum, but I’ll always find something I’m happy with.
j
ETA: thinking about it, we’ll be gossiping with friends over a coffee tomorrow in the cafe at Nyman’s Gardens.
I always get a kick out of Orwell’s essay on tea. First, he roundly lambasts anyone who takes sugar in their tea, since it “masks the flavor”, and says that folks who sugar their tea just don’t like the taste of tea. And then, he goes to great length as to the proper way to dilute your tea with an equal volume of milk. Between your half a mug of milk and my spoonful of sugar, which one of us is masking the flavor, again?
There was a tea house near the University of Pittsburgh where I liked to go, get a pot of tea and maybe a snack and just relax (looking now it is no more).
Very early in our relationship, I took my gf there. Our waitress was a young girl who I’d previously helped book a tattoo appointment with a local artist who only worked by referral. I knew the guy and vouched for her.
I’d never seen the completed piece, which ran along her rib cage in NSFW fashion. She grabbed my hand, dragged me over behind a screen, lifted her shirt and showed me.
My gf was a bit shocked, but my explanation made perfect sense. I was a bit embarrassed.
So I just tried making a cup of tea. I added a tiny pinch of salt, a bit of honey, and a splash of almond milk (I wonder what the Brits have to say about almond milk in tea). Apart from the salt that’s how I normally make it. It tastes pretty much the same, but I looked at the ingredient list on the almond milk and noticed that it listed… salt. So I wonder if I was already getting the effect of the sodium ions from the salt in the almond milk. I had already noticed in the past that adding almond milk seemed to cut the bitterness.
I’m not sure they actually succeeded in popularizing them.
Yeah - if it helps, I have never eaten or, to the best of my knowledge, seen a jellied ell.
j
They have their niche in multiple cultures, and of course were popular enough to figure prominently in much of the writing of P.G. Wodehouse.
Stranger
When asked to comment on British cuisine, John Cleese once said, “Well . . we had an empire to run.”
It’s also been said that the British conquered India just to finally get a cuisine.
To be fair, blood sausage is commonly consumed in parts of East Asia where tea is consumed in a civilized manner, often or usually without all that adulterating sugar or milk.
But, yes, the Brits often do…odd things to their consumables that cause the head to involuntarily shake
I believe the now classic retort is the Empire’s primary raison d’etre was to find decent food to eat, since we could all see what they ate at home.
ETA: Ninja’d!