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The Way It Is With Tea And Me
"Hyson, Congou, Bohea, and a few lesser divinities....."
-- Canto LXX, Ezra Pound
Starting with family meals, iced tea figures largely in every picture which comes back to me from my childhood. In the background but there—after church the day Redge Hanes and I caught the snake, or visiting on front porches or when we came in from playing or looked up from reading—always there. The Chinese sage who called tea one of "the seven necessities" for daily life could have come from North Carolina.
North Carolinians don't need to be told that our state is named for the first tea drinker to occupy the British throne: We have commemorated his example almost every day since our beginnings and in tea have composed some of the more peculiar pages of our history. In my own family, successive generations of womenfolk have disputed custody of a so-called "Penelope Barker" tea service, not always civilly. This handsome old silver pot and its companion pieces were once the possessions of our most notorious ancestor on the Barker side, a thrice-married and thrice-widowed forerunner of Scarlett O'Hara invariably known to us, her posterity, as "Mrs. Barker."
Our less-than-prim Penelope had lived in Edenton on the coast of North Carolina during the last excitement that erstwhile colonial capital had experienced since they sank Black Beard, a leading local entrepreneur from a previous generation. This was the pre-Revolutionary year 1773 when Americans the length of the Atlantic seaboard were being asked to weight their love of tea against their love of country.
Boston was not alone in the staging of patriotic tea parties, but history quickly forgot the tea protests of that autumn and winter at Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Annapolis, and Greenwich, Delaware. The tale of Penelope Barker's tea party at Edenton has survived, however, handed down in our family along with the very pot which was present for the occasion. Generations of children have been suitably impressed by this big old pot and by Mrs. Barker's phrase—"the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea." After a farewell cup, fifty of the Albemarle's foremost ladies swore, in Penelope's own words, "not to Conform to the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea, until such time as all Acts which tend to enslave our Native Country shall be repealed...and we do therefore accordingly subscribe this Page, as witness to our fixed Intention and Solemn Determination." Whenever the ancient pot appeared, we were told once again how Mrs. Barker got the ladies to sign "this Page" which she had composed and then sent it to a London newspaper in confident expectation of creating a sensation in England. Only a few months after "this Page" appeared in print, some anonymous New Englander fired "the shot heard round the world" and with a prenatal disinclination for tea our Republic began struggling to be born. We imagined this was all largely Mrs. Barker's doing, and aided by her large vocabulary. Hot tea from her pot tasted better, I still think, because it was "Pernicious."
Thinking about these antecedents and early memories, it sometimes seems to me that I must have inherited a special relationship with the miracle of vegetation which is the subject of this book. Both my life and my forebears' seem fairly steeped in tea. Like "iced tea," "hot tea" was always one word in the South—we seldom heard the noun unmodified. "Hot tea," properly made, was a wintertime experience at our house, or something that happened when one lay abed feverish and frightened by those mysterious sensations illness creates in us in childhood. It was still a lemon-and-sugar affair; I'm not sure anybody had ever heard of adding milk instead. The only tea lore commonly acknowledged was that the best was to be had from First Colony. Carolinians and Virginians had sworn by First Colony tea for generations and it was believed the firm's founder had supplied tea to Queen Victoria in her day. I am thankful my grandmother never learned that her taste for Queen's Blend Tea was never shared by Her late Majesty, since she certainly derived more pleasure from her mistaken belief than I have from knowing that the Scottish Mr. Gill simply named her favorite tea in Victoria's honor when he founded First Colony in Norfolk about 1870. One puzzling thing tea can teach us is how stories and legends affect how things taste.
The poetry of tea with its great evocative syllables like "Oolong" and "Nilgiri" I discovered at Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina was a comparatively small, overwhelmingly male school at that time and the Honors Program, to which I was admitted, was known as "Suicide Fifty" on account of the Herculean labors we fifty let ourselves in for. A student obtained the professors' permission to join these fast-track classes by getting invited to tea to be looked over and sized up. When I was asked by the tweediest and most intimidating of the whole Anglophile lot "Are you a Darjeeling man?" I replied without missing a beat "No sir, I'm from Forsyth County." To associate that name with that flavor was the first lesson he taught me and the one I still remember best, although apparently I was deemed ignorant enough to qualify for the great man's Virgil class. Besides the never-to-be-forgotten Darjeeling, I left school having at least heard of names like Formosa Oolong or Assam. On a whim I emigrated across the continent to San Francisco, looked around, and saw that it was good. It was September, 1965.
I fell in love with California and the wines of California and wrote a book entitled "The Wine Bibber's Bible" about them which enjoyed a surprising success. I was second to none in enthusiasm for my new-found profession and the good life encumbering it, but after a decade as a leading consumer of California wines I proved unequal to the sacrifice of sobriety required. One puts off as long as possible admitting that one is alcoholic, but eventually I could no longer deny the fact. Wine, once my friend, my beloved, had turned into my deadliest enemy. With no expectation of ever again finding her equal, I turned to tea, as much out of despair as self-defense.
Tea is quiet and it takes a quiet palate to appreciate something which calls so little attention to itself. At first it was simply a fluid safe to drink in great quantities and therefore suitable for a compulsive drinker such as myself. It also satisfied the need for ritual observances, occupying my hands not with glass and corkscrew but objects still more pleasurable to handle and behold. Importantly, it was a social drink to share and create occasions with friends. After many months my alcohol-ravaged sensibilities also began to notice that tea, while no intoxicant, most definitely produces a high all its own—a state of heightened alertness, of tranquility and freedom from care, of ruddy cheeks and sparkling conversation. Tea exhilarates. Tea's taste was perhaps its last attribute to come to my attention, but I gradually realized there are at least as many teas as wines in this world and learned to think of it in the plural.
All this time my long-suffering publisher phoned regularly to ask what I was writing and I just as regularly replied "Nothing. I'm simply drinking tea." Finally she shot back "Well for God's sake write about that!" I agreed at once. The parallels between wine and tea had already occurred to me—both are products in which agriculture aims to approach art, not to mention all the matter of wares, geography, customs, economics and history common to both. Besides, if I wanted a good book on the subject I would have to write it, I already knew. "The Tea Lover's Treasury," when it eventually appeared in 1982, began with an introduction which the late M.F.K. Fisher kindly contributed to signal her approval. I shall always cherish the judgment she passed on my work: "Norwood Pratt's book about tea is written so deftly, in its heady combination of learning and pure love, that its pages will cheer us long after what's in the cup is cold and stale." It was in the course of writing it that I learned to taste tea as I had wine, with attention and growing devotion. Teas are the subtlest tastes our tongues can detect, I decided, for tea does not even have a taste but rather just an effect, like the wind.
"The New Tea Lover's Treasury" which you are holding in your hands is the fruit these past twenty years of tea life have borne. It contains quantities which I did not know before and which, come to think of it, few besides me know at present. It is not a book that will interest most people, but if you have read this far you may be one of the happy few for whom this work is intended, the ancient and world-wide cult of tea lovers. We have never made a secret of our esoteric rituals or of those sonorous passwords to pleasure, the names of our favorite teas. But we seek abiding pleasure, not instant gratification, and most in this world take no interest in these mysteries. In every generation, apparently, we have always been a self-elected coterie. There's no question of our being elitist—a tea lover who is not elitist fares poorly. This explains why we are thought as a group so very particular, fussy, snobbish. We are.
Our numbers nevertheless are increasing in the United States and our sleepy old tea trade has begun to wake up. Where fewer than 20 fine tea companies existed in the US when my first tea book appeared, there are well over 120 today, not counting the numerous tea rooms which flourish in certain cities. The total US market for tea is worth a yearly US$4 billion as we enter the third millennium CE. Best of all, our Chinese comrades are beginning to share with us their ancient tea culture and its legendary teas.
A love of tea inevitably engenders friendships around the world and any one writing a book on tea is wise to live in San Francisco, where friends from around the world may be discovered living next door. It is hard to imagine anywhere else that somebody from the North Carolina countryside could be made "Honorary Director" of the first traditional Chinese tea house in the Western hemisphere, but that is exactly what happened to me. My indebtedness to my teachers Grace and Roy Fong is evident throughout this book and remains unpayable, for they have granted me access to the very homeland of tea with her ancient secrets and infinite variety. Second to none among my tea friends and teachers is John Harney of Harney & Sons Fine Teas. John, with his sons Michael and Paul, and my distinguished colleague Gaetano Kazuo Maida have made this book possible and for this and for long friendship I give them heartfelt thanks.
With the tea friends I have mentioned and others—omitting many—named in acknowledgements, I invite you to discover how the history of tea lives on in the cups before us. It is a story-book romance that poses a question which should baffle us all: How is it that one of the most extraordinary and fascinating epics of human consciousness and endeavor can remain so little known? Just as wine is the Christian sacrament, tea is Taoist/Buddhist communion and its story illuminates the life and culture of Asia, not to mention much else. And illumination, no less, is the goal of the pursuit of tea, I am beginning to believe. It goes beyond the pursuit of pleasure—though God knows it is that too—and has nothing to do with lifeless knowledge. Tea is something that always makes you feel a bit better and more civilized. And what else can illumination be?
Now I shall indulge myself with fresh Dragon Well drunk Chinese-style from a guywan, my reigning favorite among green teas. The spirit of China inhabits its nectar and I shall enjoy its luscious, vegetative companionship for several infusions, looking up from these sentences at the fog blanketing San Francisco Bay and pausing between sips to listen to foghorns. Before bedtime, as always, I will drink a cup of China's ancient Pu-Er, as healthful as anything doctors know how to prescribe, and tonight I will sleep soundly. Whatever else tomorrow brings, it most assuredly includes tea, yet to account for its charm and mystery is more than mine or any mere book can manage.
James Norwood Pratt
Russian Hill, San Francisco
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“…probably the best single book on tea available on the market. It is a slim volume that instructs both novice and connoisseur alike. Written in an entertaining, discussive style with enough common sense knowledge and practicality to be a beginner’s guide, it is filled with anecdotes and history enough to make a connoisseur proud. Norwood Pratt’s New Treasury is probably the only book on tea you need, if you want only one."
—Darrell Corti
“A Tea Book for Your Library” in Corti Bros. Catalog (Winter 2001)
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