delanceyplace.com 3/11/08 - black and green tea

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In today's excerpt - black and green tea:

"The earliest unambiguous reference to tea is from the first century BCE, some twenty-six centuries after Shen Nung's supposed discovery of tea. Having started out as an obscure medicinal and religious beverage, tea first seems to have become a domestic drink in China around this time. ...

"Tea is first mentioned [as an import from China] in European reports from the region in the 1550s. ... The first tea was green tea, the kind that had always been consumed by the Chinese. Black tea, which is made by allowing the newly picked green leaves to oxidize by leaving them overnight, only appeared during the Ming dynasty; its origins are a mystery. It came to be regarded by the Chinese as suitable only for consumption by foreigners, and eventually dominated exports to Europe. Clueless as to the origins of tea, Europeans wrongly assumed green and black tea were two entirely different botanical species. ...

"Tea got its start [in England], when it became fashionable at the English court following the marriage in 1662 of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal. Her enormous dowry included the Portuguese trading posts of Tangier and Bombay ... a fortune in gold, and a chest of tea. Catherine was a devoted tea drinker, and brought the custom with her. ...

"It is not too much exaggeration to say that almost nobody in Britain drank tea at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and nearly everybody did at the end of it. Official imports grew from six tons in 1699 to eleven thousand tons a century later, and the price of a pound of teal at the end of the century  was one-twentieth of the price at the beginning. ... [Consumption was actually greater than imports would indicate because of] the widespread practice of adulteration the stretching of tea by mixing it with ash and willow leaves, sawdust, flowers and more dubious substances—even sheep's dung according to one account—often colored and disguised using chemical dyes. Tea was adulterated in one way or another at almost every stage along the chain from leaf to cup. ... Black tea became more popular partly because it was more durable than green tea on long voyages, but also as a side effect of this adulteration. Many of the chemicals used to make fake green tea were poisonous, whereas black tea was safer even when adulterated. As black tea started to displace the smoother, less bitter green tea, the addition of sugar and milk helped to make it more palatable."