Your Tea Comes with Baggage

How did tea become British when tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China? This history of this leafy beverage travels thousands of miles over thousands of years. It’s a story of human brutality and suffering on a global scale, but also of innovation and increasing connection among the peoples of earth. We even explore the origins of Southern sweet tea. At the end, you'll discover why that seemingly innocent teabag comes with strings attached.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 104 | Doug Sofer

Your Tea Comes with Baggage

© 2023 Doug Sofer

Intro

•   Welcome back friendly listener to this gleaming new podcast about how exploring history—opens our eyes—to the Strangeness of Now.

•   [pause]

•   I hope you’ve got your passport ready because today we’re going to take a trip to the city of Truro in England, in County Cornwall.

•   Hey, we’ve landed! Welcome to England!

•   [Fade out vamp, play God Save Queen here.]

•   Since you are one of my listeners, you’re automatically charming and clever. You therefore quickly become mates—that means friends—with a couple of Truronians—that means people from Truro.

•   They invite you to their flat—that means apartment—for a traditional afternoon meal called a cream tea— a Cornish variation of English afternoon tea—or just “tea.”

•   Sure, your mates serve tea-the-drink, but there’s also food, like maybe scones [rhyme with gone].

•   And those scones are not sweet like what passes for scones in the States.

•   You cut the not-very-sweet scone in half and apply what’s called “clotted cream” to it.

•   Then, because scones are not sweet—your hosts tell you to sweeten them—with jam.

•   Since your hosts are Cornish traditionalists they inform you that you must put the cream on first and the jam only afterwards. Only those weirdos from Devon add the jam first and then the clotted cream.

•   [pause]

•   You leave your new mates, realizing that you have been downright jammy—that means lucky—to have had this opportunity to enjoy this time-honored and delicious ritual.

•   [resume vamp]

•   In fact, English tea has many longstanding traditions and rituals associated with it.

•   So where do you grow tea in England anyway? And when did the ancient art of tea cultivation first begin here?

•   [pause]

•   It turns out that tea leaves are harvested commercially in England in a place called Tregothnan—just a few miles down the road from your mates’ flat in Truro.

•   And they’ve been growing this tea in England since all the way back in the year [long pause] 2005.

•   [pause]

•   That’s right: Tea has been growing in England since time immemorial. Since the iPhone was still two full years away from being released—a storied age when a heroic figure named James the Blunt struggled with a mysterious band of Arctic Monkeys over who would reign supreme over the UK’s Singles Chart.

•   [very long pause]

•   But come to think of it, 2005 is pretty recent in the big picture. Up to that time, tea-the-leafy-beverage had not grown commercially in the UK at all.

•   [pause]

•   Think about that for a second: For centuries, tea has been crucial to what it means to be English-and/or-British—and/or [slight hesitation only] United Kinglish.

•   And for almost all that time, this important symbol of national identity was connected to Britain’s dominance over a globe-spanning empire. An empire that connected to, and conquered, other parts of the world.

•   [pause]

•   What’s more, part of the reason that tea became popular here in the first place has to do with its connection to sugar—the stuff in the jam that helps you sweeten the non-sweetened scones.

•   [pause]

•   Some folks might think of sweetened tea with little pastries as dainty or innocent. 

•   But as we’ll tease out in today’s episode, tea and sugar have their roots in a complex, messy, and sometimes incredibly ugly past. 

•   [PRE-BUILD-UP] Oh and hey—I get it: Thinking about the repercussions of your morning beverages can make you feel disorientated—that means disoriented—as if you’re wacked out on too much caffeine.

•   [THEME BUILD]

•   But fear not. I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to guide people through situations precisely like yours.

•   My name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo. Just. Like. You.

•   [THEME]

•   [SPONSORSHIP BLURB]

•   If you’re enjoying this podcast, come visit findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to learn how you can encourage the future existence of this history project.

How Tea Became British

•   You and I live far from the growing places of many of the foods and drinks we ingest.

•   And we probably don’t reflect much about how this situation came to be. Or why.

•   Or about how seriously odd it must have seemed when these consumable goods showed up in marketplaces and on tables for the first time.

•   Luckily, You Are A Weirdo [divebomb] is the name of this podcast, so you’re in the right place to consider this phenomenon.

•   [pause]

•   Today’s episode is called “Your Tea Comes With Baggage.”

•   The history of English tea begins even before 2005.

•   Way before, actually.

•   And it starts far away from England—in what’s probably the most important commercial area in all of human history: The Indian Ocean trade region.

•   Take a look at a map of the Indian Ocean and you’ll see this huge area that goes from eastern Africa—and the Arabian Peninsula—and then travels east through Persia—modern-day Iran—to the Indian Subcontinent—to Southeast Asia—to the Pacific islands of Indonesia and Malaysia—through the Philippines and east to China and Japan.

•   If geography’s not your thing, I’ll link to a map on findyourselfinhistory.com to show you what I’m talking about.

•   Either way, you’ll see that the region is enormous—something like 4,700 miles between its western and eastern extremes.

•   The Indian Ocean connected most of the world’s biggest, richest population centers.

•   And it was easier to navigate than most other oceanic routes because you could hug the coastline for much of it.

•   For that reason, people travelled back and forth throughout these populated places, creating networks of exchange in the process. The earliest networks date back to thousands of years BCE or BC years.

•   They exchanged products: silk, incense, cotton, gold, spices, porcelain, fruits, vegetables, opium, tin, silk, manufactured goods, animal products, and many other trade goods.

•   They also traded ideas.

•   The religious-slash-philosophical tradition known as Buddhism, for instance, spread from its birthplace in northeastern India, and then throughout Southeast Asia and eventually to China and Japan and beyond.

•   And those Buddhists brought with them this really cool leaf that you could steep in hot water and that seemed to give you energy to get all kinds of work done.

•   The leaves are from a shrubby tree called Camellia sinensis—which is native to an around Bangladesh, western Burma/Myanmar, and the Brahmaputra River region in far Eastern India in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains.

•   It accompanied Buddhist merchants and others as they traversed thousands of miles throughout Southeast Asia and into China.

•   It was during China’s Tang Dynasty that lasted between the years 618 and 907 AD or CE, that tea became China’s favorite beverage.

•   It was popularized by a poet and scholar named Lu Yu, who lived from 733 to 804. Lu Yu had been raised in a Buddhist monastery and wrote a book that became known in China simply as Classic of Tea.

•   The book itself was mostly a manual for tea connoisseurs, including information on how to cultivate, ferment and store the tea leaves, and then how to prepare the best beverage possible from them.

•   The book is especially useful for our purposes because it demonstrates that critical transition period between when the beverage was new and weird, to when it became normal and part of everyday life in China.

•   Authoring the main book on the subject during that time period turned Lu Yu into a major celebrity; a present-day scholar of East Asian languages and culture named James Benn, refers to Lu Yu as the [QE] “patron saint of tea”—while the authors of another history of tea assert that because of his tea book, “[QE] Lu Yu was elevated to the status of demigod…”

•   Chinese Artisans who made tea pots and tea cups and other tea-related pottery would throw in a porcelain action figure of Lu Yu for thei r best customers who purchased sufficient quantities of tea paraphernalia.

•   [pause]

•   Over the next centuries, Tea culture continued to develop in China and in Japan. It also spread to new places like Russia, and remained important in tea’s Himalayan homeland on the Indian subcontinent.

•   [pause]

•   Okay, fine, you might be saying. But how did tea ever get to western Europe? And to England?

•   To answer that question, we’ll have to excuse ourself momentarily from our little tea party, and investigate the history of trade between the Indian Ocean and its equally wet Western counterpart: the Mediterranean Sea.

•   [separator music]

How Europe connected to the Indian Ocean

•   Merchants linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean through a series of enormous east-west trade routes that we call the Silk Road.

•   Enterprising traders had been traveling along that route since China’s Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 BCE/BC to 220 CE/AD.

•   During that age, goods traveled to and from places as far away as the Roman Empire—something like 5,000 miles away from China.

•   [pause]

•   The general, big-picture, low-res version of what came next goes something like this:

•   When the Roman Empire collapsed at the end of Fifth Century, Western Europe became more cut off from the world than it had been under a unified Roman state. 

•   That isolation is one of the reasons many folks still refer to this period as the so-called “Dark Ages.”

•   By the end of the 11th century, Western European kingdoms took part in the Crusades—an attempt to conquer—or RE-conquer in European estimations—Jerusalem and other sites in the Middle East of importance to Christianity.

•   Following some initial successes, Western Europeans set up what were called the Crusader States—four Catholic Christian states in the eastern Mediterranean—located in today’s Israel/Palestine/Lebanon/Syria and Turkey.

•   These states stuck around for a couple of centuries, but by 1291 they were all conquered—or RE-conquered in Persian and North African estimations—by Muslim armies led from Persia and Egypt.

•   Militarily, then, the Crusades didn’t succeed in the long term. But culturally and economically, they changed the way that Western Europeans saw themselves in the world.

•   Specifically, the long presence of Europeans and their descendants in the Middle East allowed Western Europeans to get a taste for all kinds of goods produced in and traded throughout the Islamic World

•   Those goods included plant-based consumable goods such as sugar and spices, and even some really weird things like coffee which hailed originally from East Africa and ended up in Yemen, for instance.

•   Trade for some of those goods continued after the Crusader states fell, but that commerce was largely interrupted by the chaos that characterized the Late Middle Ages. That period went from about 1300 through 1500—during which Western Europe was plagued by war, and plagued by famine, and plagued by plagues like the Black Death.

•   All that plaguing made it harder to maintain business as usual with the rest of the world.

•   A couple of centuries later, the situation finally started to stabilize and Europeans looked outward to other parts of the world again.

•   That next period from—let’s call it 1350 to 1600ish is known as the Early Modern Era or the Renaissance.

•   It was a European cultural rebirth—which is what Re-naissance means.

•   [pause]

•   And when it came to rebirthing international trade, Renaissance leaders were hoping to gain the big prize.

•   That big prize was access to that really lucrative Indian Ocean trade region we were already talking about. You know: The place that had already been trading tea for roughly a thousand years.

•   Renaissance Europe’s thirst for new wealth and new cultural inputs, coincided with a new spirit of exploration, discovery and conquest.

•   One spirited Renaissance man especially interested in exploring, discovering and conquering was Prince Henry of Portugal who lived from 1394–1460.

•   You may have learned about him “Henry the Navigator”—even though he never actually navigated a ship.

•   But Henry did fund many ocean voyages.

•   Why? He was trying to see if it was possible to get to the Indian Ocean without having to go through intermediaries in the Islamic World.

•   Look again at that map of the world and you’ll see that the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, Egypt and Iran are all in between the Mediterranean and the start of the Indian Ocean.

•   Those places were the mightiest states in the Islamic world and forced those who wanted access to Asian trade to work through them.

•   Henry wanted to go around them all.

•   So where could they go to get to the Indian Ocean? It’s clear from that map that taking the long journey around the coast of Africa was the only way to go.

•   Though Christopher Columbus would later propose going east to the Indian Ocean by going west. Which can be done. But which, unbeknownst to Columbus, turned out to be the very, very, very, very, very long way to get to Asia. That miscalculation would inadvertently give Europeans access to a whole new place called the Americas.

•   Meanwhile, the events that Henry of Portugal had set in motion led Portugal to establish a global network of trading centers.

•   I remember reading when I was younger something about Portugal having set up a network of so-called Trading posts. But I don’t think that term does justice to what Portugal set up.

•   I don’t know about you but when I think of a trading post, I imagine a charming little wooden shelter by the side of a country road, where some friendly folks are selling home-grown tomatoes or farm-fresh eggs, or some kind of whole-grain-home-baked bread-cakey thing.

•   And that’s exactly like what Portugal had—

•   Except that instead of friendly wholesome folks, they had armed-to-the-teeth sailing vessels sacking competing trading towns and shooting anyone else who got in their way.

•   And instead of a little wooden shelter, they built enormous walled fortifications bristling with cannons to defend their claims.

•   These fortresses-slash-naval bases-slash trade centers transformed Europe’s relationship to global commerce.

•   [pause]

•   The first of these places went up in Portugal’s Atlantic islands like the Azores and Madeira.

•   Then they built similar fortress facilities in western Africa.

•   Eventually Portugal’s merchant navy navigated around the entire enormous continent of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and continued establishing these fortified armed trading encampments in Asia.

•   They established fortress-trading centers in Goa in India and on the island of Sri Lanka, conquering and trading and fortifying as they went.

•   But then in 1513, they got stuck.

•   They had tried to establish a base of operations in China during the Ming Dynasty, but over the next decades, they were chased out repeatedly by Chinese forces and lost a war with China in 1548.

•   But then in 1554, different Portuguese agents agreed to pay the Imperial Chinese government a bunch of silver annually to build a Portuguese trading zone on the port of Macau.

•   Despite this cost, Portuguese access to Chinese and Indian trade goods, along with other food products from the American hemisphere made Portugal into a global trading juggernaut.

•   [pause]

•   By 1569, a couple of decades after Portugal had starting renting its Macau base of operations, the Dominican friar Gaspar Da Cruz published his notes on life in China.

•   And Da Cruz’s notes include the first-ever account of a European drinking a cup of tea.

•   [pause]

•   Da Cruz explains in his book that there’s a brewed concoction served in homes in China called “Chá” and that it’s “[QE] red and very medicinal.” It’s served on a charming tray to any prestigious guests, whether those folks are well-known to the people of the home or not.

•   Da Cruz adds that he was offered this cha stuff many times—indicating to his readers that he was, in fact, one of those prestigious guests he’d mentioned.

•   In fact, the word for tea in Portuguese is still Chá. And the word for tea in Chinese is pronounced “cha” [lilt upward]—at least that’s if we trust the Google Translate Lady.

•   [pause]

•   So now finally, we have clear evidence of a European who drank some tea, and it only took us until 1569—just 830-something years or so after Lu Yu had helped popularize the drink during the Tang Dynasty.

•   Europe had clearly arrived late to tea time.

•   [pause]

•   And the English took even longer to get there than had their continental cousins.

•   It was another 83 years—1652—when entrepreneurs established the first two coffee houses in England—one in Oxford and another one in London.

•   Shortly after the coffee, they started brewing tea in those establishments too—and it was the less popular of the two new drinks.

•   [pause]

•   But then tea got a huge boost in 1662, when England’s King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. And where do you think she was from? Yes, you guessed it:

•   [pause]

•   [Profoundly] She was from Braganza.

•   [pause]

•   Oh and the point is that Braganza is a town on the northeast corner—of Portugal.

•   [pause]

•   Catherine was young, and attractive, and all kinds of fancy.

•   And she especially fancied tea.

•   Like the duck-face-pouting influencers of today’s social media, Catherine’s choice of beverage made tea the it-drink of England.

•   [pause]

•   But Da Cruz’s complaint that it was bitter remained a problem for British consumers to really take to the beverage.

•   The good news from the perspective of thirsty and hitherto insufficiently caffeinated Brits, was that tea’s celeb status coincided with Britain’s increasing control over the production and consumption of sugar.

•   [pause]

•   And as we’re about to see, that may have been the only good news when it came to the sugar trade.

•   [Transition music here]

Sugar = War & Slavery

•   Sugar is sweet and innocent, right? Today in the U.S. we can buy sugar in ten pound bags for fifteen bucks. That’s cheaper than it is to buy a little jar of imported clotted cream or Cornwall jam in the ‘States.

•   In fact, sugar is so cheap now, that businesses give it away for free in little paper packets.

•   But from its earliest history in Europe and in the Americas, the sweet sugar industry brought three bitter consequences along with it: Plantation slavery, wars, and environmental catastrophe.

•   I realize that the episode becomes a lot less fun at this point, but we simply cannot accurately discuss the sugar industry within any kind of historical context without mentioning slavery.

•   [That’s because there was a] tremendous human cost to Portugal’s meteoric rise as a world power—a cost especially apparent on the continent of Africa.

•   Those trade-fortresses that Portugal had established on the African coastlines served to destabilize the political scene on some parts of the continent.

•   African states began to compete with each other for access to Portugal’s globally traded products— including those coming from some of the wealthiest places in the world in the Indian Ocean trade basin.

•   Portuguese traders deliberately encouraged that competition, which led to more wars between different African societies.

•   In return, Portugal eventually traded with African nations for their war captives, exploiting and distorting already-existing markets for people—servants and other kinds of forced laborers.

•   Those older African systems of forced labor—and there were many different varieties—better resembled what’s called “classical” slavery of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome—than the slave system of the Americas that would follow.

•   For instance, within the modern-day borders of Ghana in West Africa, historian Akosua Adoma Perbi shows that African forms of forced labor often ended up with servants becoming part of extended family units.

•   Over time, manumission—gaining one’s freedom—was also fairly common in these earlier African systems.

•   And maybe most important, the status of forced laborers wasn’t necessarily inherited by future generations—slavery was more of an individual than a collective condition on the continent of Africa.

•   In short, many —but not all—African categories looked more like servitude than slavery.

•   This isn’t to suggest that forced labor of any kind is pleasant or somehow benign. It’s just that not all kinds of forced labor are equal, and most forms in Africa held within them some future hope of freedom or a better life.

•   By contrast, this new system of slavery that the Portuguese established under their legal system, converted African war captives into property.

•   And they would usually be taken off the continent entirely, and brought to the Americas.

•   Why? Because Portugal and eventually other European nations too wanted laborers to work their sugar plantations for their new colony of Brazil.

•   The result of this supply of and demand for human beings was the brutal system called the Atlantic Slave Trade, the largest-scale scheme of mass-human trafficking the world has seen.

•   And other European countries would take part in this trade too.

•   Less than a century after Portugal had built all of those trading-post-slash-fortresses we talked about earlier, the Netherlands tried to do the same thing and become a globe-trotting power in its own right.

•   And then France and England followed suit too.

•   Before you knew it, many of those Portuguese fortifications got taken over by Dutch, French, and British naval forces.

•   The places under contest became war zones.

•   If you go today to the islands of the Caribbean, or to many sites on the coastline of Africa, or to parts of India, you’ll find all these fortresses with rusty old cannons poking out of every place imaginable.

•   And almost all those canons point to the sea. They’re designed to repel invasion forces coming from foreign navies.

•   From the 16th century through the end of the 1700s, Sugar had become the most lucrative agricultural commodity in the world.

•   Fortunes were won and lost fighting for the tropical soils in which sugarcane could grow, especially in the islands and coastal areas on the Caribbean Sea.

•   Caribbean rainforests were clear cut in that same process.

•   [pause]

•   With the intensity of labor required to work sugarcane on a large scale, the Dutch, French, and British adopted Portugal’s version of African slavery for themselves, and expanded it wherever they grew sugar.

•   Sugar profits therefore led to further competition—and international wars between these European kingdoms—not only in the Caribbean over sugarcane soils, but also over control of those West African trading fortifications where human beings continued to be purchased.

•   That perverse trade, in turn, led to even more competition—and more wars—between African societies to trade with those Europeans for access to their global trade goods.

•   Which led to more human beings—more enemy war captives—to be sold as human property.

•   The whole system continued to reinforce itself, growing larger and larger.

•   [pause]

•   And it continued to exist so long as sugar stayed profitable.

•   That situation didn’t begin to change until the last decades of the 18th century.

•   Across the English Channel, the French Revolution of 1789 sowed chaos not only France but also in all of France’s colonies all around the globe.

•   Two years later in 1791, the enslaved people living on the French sugar-producing colony of St. Domingue, along with free people of African descent, launched a revolution of their own against the colony’s slaveholders.

•   And they won.

•   The Haitian Revolution as it became known, has its own long and complex history, full of triumphs and tragedies alike.

•   But one of its lasting legacies was making European colonizers think twice about keeping the institution of slavery around.

•   After all, keeping humans captive in a forced labor system meant more overseers, more naval vessels, and more troops to prevent new rebellions. 

•   Paying for those measures made the profitability of sugar plantation slavery less sustainable.

•   At the same time, it had become clear that you can also grow perfectly good sugar right in Europe from what are called sugar beets.

•   The price of sugar dropped and made it still harder to justify slavery even on just economic grounds.

•   And lastly, increasingly large numbers of Europeans became interested in ideas of human liberation percolating around Europe. More than ever started calling for an end of slavery once and for all.

•   Britain’s Parliament halted the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Over the next years, its Royal Navy—which had once defended this commerce in people—began to intercept slave ships and free the captives.

•   [pause]

•   Even so, it took until the middle of the 19th century, following multiple other rebellions in the Caribbean, for European countries to officially abolish slavery once and for all.

•   For example, as late as 1831, even though the African slave trade had largely ended, slavery itself remained legal within Britain’s sugar colonies.

•   That year, a enslaved Jamaican named Sam Sharp, a self-appointed Baptist preacher, organized and led a revolt for freedom. It became known to its participants as the “Baptist War of 1831.”

•   British authorities eventually captured Sharp, imprisoned him, and executed him the next year. But his movement was among the main inspirations for the British Empire abolishing slavery once and for all the next year in 1833.

•   [long pause]

•   So sugar—this seemingly innocent commodity that cuts the bitterness of tea and that ends up in the jams that sweeten the scones at tea time—was once a product of multiple European empires.

•   The human cost of developing this product that we now take for granted is difficult to fathom.

•   [long pause]

•   By taking up the mantle of global empire that the Portuguese had begun, the British Empire embraced what were once new global commodities.

•   Along the way, tea became a symbol of what it was to be British.

•   And whether consumers realized it or not—whether in the past or present—tea and sugar are both part of that complex legacy.

•   [Separator music]

Iced, Sweet Tea

•   We can’t complete a conversation about tea and sugar without considering one more famous intersection of these two commodities: Sweet tea.

•   In case you haven’t spent time in the U.S. South—like if you’re actually from Cornwall—sweet tea is not from the UK at all. It’s not served in a tea cup; there’s no tea bag. In fact, it’s not even hot.

•   It’s presweetened tea, served in a tall glass with ice, and it’s pretty much the most important beverage in the U.S. South—with the possible exceptions of beer and whiskey.

•   [Ice clinking in a glass noise]

•   Sweet tea shows up everywhere, including in all kinds of music from the South—whether we’re talking Country, Country-rock, Blues, Americana-Folk, or Alt-Acoustic-Folk-Americana-Country-Blues-Rockabilly.

•   “Sweet tea” is a lyric in multiple country songs; It’s the name of an album by blues legend Buddy Guy; you can even buy folksy-country stuff made out of wood—or maybe needlepoint sampler wall-hangings that say things like “[QE] Raised on sweet tea and country music.”

•   A journalist for the magazine Garden & Gun writes in a 2008 article that

•   “[QE] Sweet tea isn’t a drink, really. It’s culture in a glass. Like Guinness in Ireland. Or ouzo in Greece.”

•   In other words, although sweet tea is just sweetened iced tea, it isn’t just sweetened iced tea. It’s a symbol of identity—and part of what it means to be from the South.

•   [pause]

•   And not that long ago, it was [pause—and say decisively] Russian.

•   [long pause]

•   [quickly] Bet you didn’t see that coming.

•   [pause]

•   No seriously; I think we can make a case here. I’m looking at a publication from Britain, originally written in the early 1830s, about how much Russians are obsessed with ice.

•   Remember that in the 1830s, ice pretty much only came from very cold places. Ice-makers and electric freezers were yet to be invented.

•   And Russia was—and is—a famously cold place for much of the year. But its summers could be—and still can be—surprisingly hot.

•   The extremely logical solution then, was to store ice in the winter and use it to cool things off in the summer.

•   The article’s author—a German travel writer and scholar named Johan Kohl—explains:

•   “[QE] An immense quantity of ice is consumed in Russian house keeping. Throughout the summer, ices are sold in the streets of every Russian town; and not only iced water, iced wine, and iced beer, but even iced tea, is drunk in immense quantities.”

•   The word “even” there in “even iced tea” suggests something important: Iced tea seemed like a strange concept—at least to this author—in the mid-19th century.

•   What’s more, a couple of decades later in 1851, an English publication edited by none other than Charles Dickens himself, quoted this same exact German author’s observation about how very odd it was that Russians drank iced tea.

•   The tea described there is iced—but not necessarily sweet.

•   So I went looking for more references to so-called “Russian Tea”—and found some—that were sweet—but not necessarily iced.

•   The whole search got very confusing very quickly.

•   That’s because the term “Russian Tea” shows up in all kinds of English language cookbooks in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.

•   But the concept of “Russian Tea” in both the UK and U.S. during that time ends up working kind of like other food names that are only sort-of related to the country we claim them to be from.

•   Like “French toast” or “Belgian Waffles” or “Russian dressing” or “French dressing” or “Italian dressing” [pause]

•   Hey—why do Americans’ have an obsession with pretending that our salad dressings come from other countries? And why isn’t there an American dressing?

•   Those all may be fine questions, but this episode is not called “Your Salad Sauce Confuses me!” so we’d best move on.

•   The point is that the connections between some foods and the countries they purportedly hail from are tenuous at best.

•   [pause]

•   The same is true with Russian Tea, which for most of the English speaking world seems to have briefly meant tea made with lemon and sometimes with sugar in it.

•   Why Russian? Well it turns out that the Russian-tea connection is legit; generally speaking, Russians love their tea.

•   The first Russian contact with the beverage probably came in 1616 just under a half century after the first mention of tea by Portuguese sources. By 1674—just a decade after Catherine of Braganza had started pushing tea to the Brits—tea also became a luxury drink available in large quantities in Moscow via Chinese trade.

•   And also like in England, it became popular for Russians from many walks of life in the early decades of the 1700s.

•   And once again, a big part of tea’s success in Russia only came through its sweetening through sugar.

•   Where did the Russians get their sugar? At first, they got it from the British among others.

•   You may remember from school that the British used a bunch of semi-government-semi-private chartered trading groups—

•   The most famous of these were the British East India Company and the Virginia Company. Maybe you’ve also heard of the Royal African Company.

•   Yet another one of those enterprises was called The Russia Company. And it traded a lot of different British empire goods with Russia.

•   Including sugar. The fact that Russia did not have tropical overseas colonies meant that tea drinkers had to import sugar from Western Europe. Or they sometimes used honey instead.

•   But remember those sugar beets we talked about earlier? By the end of the 1700s, Russian landowners and farmers started growing those guys—a lot of them.

•   In fact, by the end of the 1800s, the Russian empire went from importing Western European sugar to becoming an exporter of sugar to the West.

•   And as Russian beet sugar became more available, a new tradition of drinking sweetened tea emerged, that’s still practiced by some folks today.

•   It works like this: You take a sugar cube, hold it between your teeth, and sip your tea—dissolving it in your incisors as it flows by.

•   [pause]

•   Somewhere out there, a dentist has just started weeping.

•   [pause]

•   Okay, so we have all the ingredients of sweet tea now: Tea—check. Sweetness—check. But how did the concept get to the United States? And to the South?

•   [pause]

•   It’s not entirely clear. Most reliable sources I looked at agree that the first written evidence of Southern iced tea may have come as late as 1879 in a cookbook called “Housekeeping in Old Virginia.”

•   Select parts of the recipe read:

•   [QE] “After scalding the teapot, put into it one quart of boiling water and two teaspoonfuls green tea. …strain, without stirring, through a tea-strainer into a pitcher. …Fill the goblets with ice, put two teaspoonfuls granulated sugar in each, and pour the tea over the ice and sugar…. “Mrs. S. T.”

•   [pause]

•   Why green tea?

•   Because green tea was cheap and plentiful by 1879—and that’s because the United States was up to its own flavor of empire-building, similar to what the British were up to elsewhere in the world. A few decades before in 1852, Commodore Matthew Perry brought a small fleet of new, cutting-edge steam-powered warships to Japan.

•   Mounted on the ships were the first generation of French cannons known as Paixan guns [nasal Pehks-on]—named after their French inventor. These cannons fired large explosive artillery shells and could easily obliterate traditional wooden ships.

•   Perry told Japanese authorities—who at the time had access mostly to pre-industrial weaponry—that they had a year to sign a treaty that would open up their ports to U.S. trade or suffer the consequences.

•   This moment in so-called gunboat diplomacy would have all kinds of implications for U.S., Japanese and world history.

•   But for our purposes, it means that after the treaty was finalized in 1854, Japanese green tea flooded U.S. markets.

•   And that’s why what many writers claim as the first recipe for Southern sweet tea calls for green tea only.

•   [pause]

•   But hang on. Is that really the first recipe for sweet tea?

•   [pause]

•   The answer is definitely not. I found at least one from four years earlier—1875.

•   Folks might have missed it because the author of this cookbook refers to it simply as “[QE] cold tea.” Excerpts of this recipe go like this:

•   “[QE] Mixed tea is better cold than either black or green alone… When ready to use it, you must fill a goblet three quarters of the way to the top with the clear tea; sweeten it more lavishly than you would hot, and fill up the glass with cracked ice. It is a delicious beverage in summer….”

•   This 1875 sweet tea formula was published in London, and it’s by an author named Marion Harland—M-A-R-I-O-N—often a man’s name.

•   [pause]

•   For that reason, I had this whole thing ready to go in my head about how maybe that book means that some British dude—along with the Russians—really invented Southern Sweet Tea—and how we therefore all have to reexamine all kinds of other underlying assumptions: Like maybe Southern biscuits are really from Québec—or New England clam chowder is really from Burkina-Faso—or yorkie dogs are actually ferrets in disguise, and so on.

•   But it turns out that we know something about Marion Harland—which was actually a pen name for a very talented and prolific author named Mary Virginia Terhune who lived from 1830 to 1922.

•   [pause]

•   Those rooting for a classic Southern origin story to sweet tea will not be disappointed—her name has “Virginia” in it for crying out loud!

•   [pause—rising enthusiasm over next lines]

•   And she was actually from Virginia! Amelia County, south of Richmond, to be precise—none of this Northern-Virginia-that’s-practically-Washington-DC-business.

•   And best of all, Amelia County is Very Very Country—there’s something like 13,000 people in the whole county today.

•   And she was married to a minister!

•   [pause]

•   And then she moved to Newark, New Jersey!

•   [pause deflated]

•   Okay—that last place isn’t Southern at all.

•   [pause—enthusiasm down but rising slowly again]

•   But stick with me here:

•   They clearly loved her not only in rural Virginia but also in Jersey and New York City.

•   In 1871 she became the first president of the Newark YWCA—the Young Women’s Christian Association.

•   And her obituary in The New York Times from 1922 refers to her as “A Home-Making Genius” right in the headline.

•   She was a powerhouse of an author—who had been a published writer since she was fourteen years old. She wrote some two dozen novels, nearly the same number of nonfiction books, a 490-page  autobiography that a New York Times reviewer gushed over, calling it:

•    [QE] “…a book of infinite charm, and has in it … a spirit as young as that of the author’s lovely girlhood.”

•   [pause]

•   They definitely don’t write book reviews like that anymore at the Times.

•   [pause]

•   Either way, I think her 1875 recipe for mixed black-and-green tea that’s sweetened “more lavishly” than regular hot tea is an even better origin story for Southern sweet tea than the 1879 one.

•   [separator music]

Conclusion

•   Today, tea is just an assumed part of daily life for billions of people around the globe. One trade site connected to the tea industry estimates that in 2018 there were 5.89 million tons produced of the stuff worldwide. An especially impressive quantity when you realize it’s basically just a lightweight dried-out leaf.

•   And as we’ve seen, you can’t really talk about tea without mentioning sugar too. And you can’t mention sugar without acknowledging the historic human cost that came with producing it.

•   Tea would almost certainly not have become the global commodity it is today without having discovered some way to cut its bitterness with sugar.

•   [pause]

•   At its worst, these two commodities were part of a number of unpalatable processes—connected to imperial wars of conquest, and to human trafficking on an unprecedented scale in the form of the Atlantic slave trade, and to gunboat diplomacy in the name of forcing open formerly closed foreign markets to trade.

•   Yet it also led to greater connections between the peoples of the earth than ever before—and in surprising ways.

•   It linked—and continues to link—folks from India and Bangladesh to people from China. And Japan. And Russia. And, of course, the UK—and your new imaginary Cornish mates.

•   And it ultimately became the beverage of choice for Southern Americans—especially for those Southern Americans trying to avoid beer.

•   In fact, tea’s role in the anti-alcohol Temperance movement is a whole ‘nother story—possibly worthy of a future episode.

•   [long pause] 

•   So how does knowing all this help us? Does it get you to look at your sweetened cup of tea differently? Should it?

•   It’s not my job to answer those questions; you need to ask them yourself.

•   I’d love to learn what you come up with—so you’re cordially invited to drop a comment or two at Findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   But at the very least, knowing this history helps us understand that tea and sugar are not products that we’ve just magically had access to forever.

•   This history once again shows us that some of the most normal aspects of our normal lives were not always normal.

•   No matter where you’re from, grasping this context is part of understanding who we are as humans—and how the global social, cultural and political landscape continues to be shaped by these historical legacies.

Teaser/Credits/outro

·      For our next episode: We meet people online, we hang out with them for hours at a time, we think we know them. By the standards of the past, we connect in all kinds of strange new ways to other humans—creating new friends and new communities, and new comrades in arms in games—even while knowing that some of them might not even be people at all.

·      How have concepts of community changed over both space and time? Subscribe to or follow this podcast, or otherwise stay tuned to find out.

·      [pause]

·      You can find references to the historical sources, audio clips, and other cool stuff used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

·      This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

·      Thanks to everyone for listening!