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• Cup of sugar story how to#

Tea, dear friends, is a miraculous potion and if brewed to perfection it is composed on the physiognomy of the human face – and thus made to yield its God-given properties it will entice three of our most precious five senses. Whether the mafia has kidnapped you and made you kill a man with a gun to win your freedom or if you’ve done quite badly in an exam, someone will say: “Let me get you a nice cup of tea.”īut what is the problem, where did the British go wrong with their tasteless abuse of tea? Oh, Brother let me count the ways! “Nice cup of tea,” people say, when you’ve watched a vivid car accident or been given a terminal diagnosis, or gone for a walk and it’s started raining. It’s a lukewarm mug of leaf water, presented as a cure-all for life’s ills. We just putter along, thinking tea is good but it’s not good.

This is coming from writer Joel Golby, a proper Brit who has come out and declared what the British call tea “a national disgrace,” confessing for the whole world to know that their “tea is shit.” Further elaborating: I will never say such a thing about any other people’s culinary habits – no matter how atrocious. To be sure, I am not the first person to point out the fact the British are a global embarrassment to the very idea of tea. Be that as it may, the British mannerism around tea is most certainly not because of the wretchedly abused leaves they kill to nullity but because of the literary aura that Henry James and others have helped build around the ceremony.Ī proper cup of tea, as any civilised Indian, Iranian, Turk or central Asian can tell you, needs to be poured into a see-through cup, writes Dabashi “There are few hours in life more agreeable,” says Henry James famously in The Portrait of a Lady “than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Perhaps so – though the Japanese Tea Ceremony/The Way of Tea is infinitely more elegant and sublime. Yes, they have built a splendid ceremony around what they call “the afternoon tea” but at the centre of the ritual is a nonsensical disaster they make with a beautiful and miraculous herb about which they do not understand the most basic facts. Let’s put it bluntlyįirst of all, let’s talk tea. The entire article is a silly piece of British aristocratic memorabilia covering up a much nastier global history of British imperialism surrounding tea. Clumsy grammar you might say, but the point is quite clear: the origin of tea might indeed be China, but it was Catherine of Braganza, daughter of Portugal’s King John IV, who made tea popular in England. “Imagine the most English-English person you can think of,” the piece begins, “Now I’m fairly certain that no matter what picture you just conjured up, that person comes complete with a stiff upper lip and a cup of tea in their hand”. WATCH: The Stream – The real cost of your cup of tea Soon after that memorable phrase I came across a typically blase BBC report headlined “The true story behind England’s tea obsession”, celebrating British and other European aristocracies, this time about the culinary calamity the British call “tea”.

Cup of sugar story how to#

In the course of the memorable few days we spent together catching up with the latest atrocities around the globe (in between our respective talks on the habitual shenanigans of the Zionist settler colony in Palestine), perhaps the most memorable phrase I remember is when Ilan cited our mutual friend the eminent Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmed who had once told him “our singular historical failure as a nation was after 200 years of British colonialism we failed to teach them how to cook!”

Recently my colleague Ilan Pappe and I were in Mexico City attending a conference on Palestine.