He didn’t get his visa. But coffee drinkers from around the world–Arabs, Turks, Latin Americans, even Italians–complain incessantly about the undrinkable brown liquid that passes for coffee in this country. I have a different problem. As every Indian visitor to America knows, the only thing that is truly impossible to get here is a good cup of tea.
Order tea in most American eateries and what you receive is a cup of tepid water, with a mournful tea bag languishing by its side. (The classier the place, the more fancy the tea bag, but the principle’s the same.) American restaurateurs have never learned that tea is made with boiling water, not merely boiled water. Nor are they in a hurry to immerse the bag in the water as soon as it has boiled. It arrives dry and forlorn, long after the water it is meant to be dunked into has lost anything approaching the temperature needed to brew tea.
Allowing the customer to dip his own bag is American individualism at work: it lets each person determine for himself how long his tea brews. It’s equally clear that “hot tea,” as they call it with unintended irony, is a minority taste. When a American thinks of tea, it is usually iced tea, just as “hockey” here means “ice hockey” rather than the sport the rest of the world plays on fields. Traditional tea got off to a bad start here in 1773, when rebellious American colonists tossed several chests of Chinese tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes. It hasn’t fared much better since.
Of course, the tea the American revolutionaries rejected so unceremoniously wasn’t very good tea. The cargo that sank to the bottom of Boston Bay was a green tea, Young Hyson, a variety particularly popular in the colonies, which ordered more of it than could feasibly be grown. When demand exceeds supply and the ignorance of the consumer is matched by the guile of the supplier, beware. The Chinese, even in those days, realized quickly enough that Americans couldn’t tell inferior varieties and spurious mixtures of tea from the real thing, and so they sent whatever they wanted to get rid of.
Americans, unsurprisingly, didn’t much like the predictably vile liquid. It was not until 1828 that they took to importing black teas, like the rest of the civilized world. But by then the damage was done. The United States had discovered coffee.
Tea faded into obscurity till it made a comeback, through the back door, just a century ago. An English tea merchant in America, it seems, had laid in a rather large stock of Indian tea and found no buyers. Then in the summer of 1893, three factors combined to create a solution to his trouble: a heat wave, the recent invention of affordable refrigeration and the presence of large numbers of the public at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Responding quite literally to market conditions, the Englishman created a new product. “Iced tea” was born.
Iced tea does not require leaves of any real quality. Indeed, today it requires no leaves at all, since it is usually made from a powdered “instant” mix of tea dust, lemon and sugar that you spoon into water. Thus the new taste for iced tea generated no great market for good tea leaves. Most Americans who drink “hot tea” make it from tea bags of the most appalling quality, sold under interchangeable brand names in the supermarket. (Only the packaging appears to justify the differences in price.) Other teas are disguised under such flavors as “cinnamon” or “orange and spice,” where the quality of the flavoring is more important than that of the tea. Health-conscious Americans have embraced herbal teas, which are infusions of assorted leaves and not teas at all.
Some years ago the Indian Tea Board tried to rectify this lamentable state of affairs by posting a representative in New York, who went around to gourmet stores telling them their “fine Darjeeling” tea was, in fact, rarely that. Indeed, there’s more “Darjeeling” sold in America than grows in India. (Most American brews come from such lower-priced and lower-quality sources as Tanzania and Malawi.) He recommended that they purvey the real and vastly better stuff. Fuggedaboutit, as they say in New York, and the agent soon returned home.
Still, hope springs eternal. When I saw Starbucks advertising a new “chai,” the Indian word for tea, I rushed to try it and found myself gagging on an oddly spiced, flavored drink that seemed about 98 percent sugar. Moral: when in America, live like Americans. Drink coffee.
