It’s all in the timing

It must have been sixty years ago that I started to learn French. That was at a weirdly English school, even though it was in Rome. Its Englishness was above all in its spirit and in the teachers it recruited

Our teacher was English and one of the few things I remember of her teaching, was when she told us earnestly that we had to learn to distinguish between the French words ‘ay’ and ‘ay’ (that’s the same sound as the ‘ai’ in ‘pain’ and would have been deeply painful to anyone who knew more French than I did).

She meant the words ‘et’ and ‘est’ and neither is pronounced ‘ay’.

The only other thing I remember from those classes was the tale of a sign seen outside a French teashop early in the twentieth century. That was a time when the custom of tea drinking was being adopted from the Britain where, French people then and, indeed, in many cases now, see it as a long and deep-rooted tradition.

As a quick digression, that’s a misleading belief.

Back in 1652, in that strange period when England was a republic and Puritans were a lot too powerful, the first coffee shops opened. They served a drink that we would probably regard as an undrinkable sludge today. But people back then liked it, especially for the buzz it gave them. The Puritans, who abhorred alcohol though they never actually banned it, were happy to see people going for this alternative, which contained no alcohol and didn’t leave them drunk.

Coffee houses proliferated over the next few decades. They became favoured meeting places, with many developing a specific character of their own. Some focused on people in business – Lloyds of London, the insurance operation, was founded in a coffee house which gave it its name (it was Lloyds Coffee House). Others were political, with supporters of different factions gathering in different establishments. Others might cater to artists or writers or journalists, and so on.

This was before tea had become a national beverage. Though it wasn’t long before. Just eight years later, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who’d developed a taste for this infusion of leaves from the far east, began to drink tea in England.

The fashion spread rapidly, in the upper circles of English society, where ladies would serve each other this delicate drink when they met in the afternoon. So note two things about that: it was a drink taken at home, not in an establishment outside like a coffeehouse. That made it a drink fit for women, or at least ladies, who would not have liked visiting a coffee house, with its male-dominated, rowdy atmosphere. And it was a drink people preferred to take in the afternoon.

As the price fell, so the custom of drinking tea extended into ever broader circles of society, ceasing to be exclusive to the very wealthiest (or ‘best’ as they liked to think of themselves, and still do). Gradually England, and later Britain, became the temple to tea drinking that it’s reputed to be today. That’s even though it was a coffee-drinking nation earlier and, to this day, drinks more coffee than tea.

Now there are many times of day when a Brit might drink tea. With breakfast. During the morning. In the afternoon. With the evening meal which, by continental standards, Britain tends to take early (at around 6:00) and is often called ‘tea’. Classically, though, just as in the time of the restoration, tea is a drink for the afternoon, at about 4:00.

‘Four o’clock tea’ therefore became something of an institution.

And the sign outside the French teashop?

My class learned that it read ‘Ici on sert le four o’clock à cinq heures’ – here we serve the ‘four o’clock’ at five o’clock.

We all chortled.

I was reminded of all that when I saw an old flapping notice on a board in Valencia, where we live.

The municipal authorities had decided that there was some benefit in reproducing, in the city, the Oktoberfest made famous by the German city of Munich, in Bavaria. You’ve probably seen pictures of buxom German women in traditional dress carrying handfuls of those massive stone beer tankards the Germans call ‘Steine’ (which means ‘stones’). Clearly, Valencia had concluded that having their own Oktoberfest would be both fun and, probably, a money spinner, both of them attractive characteristics. So they’d organised one.

What I was looking at was a publicity poster for it.

Advertising Valencia’s Oktoberfest

It read:

IMPORTANT

The official Valencia OKTOBERFEST 

will start on 15 September.

An October festival in September? Yep. Just as much fun as the four o’clock served at five.

A cup that doesn't cheer: why the French and the Americans can't make tea

It’s ghastly trying to drink tea in the US or France. They bring you a sorry offering of a cup of hot water, distinctly off the boil once it’s made it to your table, with a tea bag by the side. You dunk the bag in the water and what emerges is an insipid liquid which shares with tea only its colour, and even then in a paler shade.

The cup that cheers but never inebriates
Not that it's particularly cheerful in the US or France

It’s long been a theory of mine that, in the case of the States, the problem was caused by the Boston Tea Party of 1773. In that deplorable incident, a bunch of rebels – or possibly freedom fighters, depending on your point of view – dressed as ‘Indians’ (though the real one were just as much native Americans then as now, they weren’t called that at the time) boarded a tea clipper, broke open its chests and tossed the precious leaves into the chilly waters of Boston harbour. 

That pouring of tea into cold water seems to me to have been a traumatic moment in the development of the American psyche, leading to the nation’s inability to make tea properly to this day.

However, I’ve recently come to know – and enjoy enormously – the work of Edith Wharton. Don’t know her writing? The Age of Innocence is well worth reading. I strongly recommend it.

The early pages of The House of Mirth contain a description of tea making in New York at the turn of the twentieth century that can leave one in no doubt that they knew how to do it. It would seem that the loss of that ability is much more recent than I had believed.

I’m forced to conclude that something far more profound is at work here. Might it be that later waves of immigrants, from such coffee-drinking nations as Italy, left the country with a population that really didn’t understand tea and, what’s more, probably didn’t care?

Because if that’s the answer, I can understand the attitude. It may be true that attaching so much importance to how tea’s made might just be one of our national bad habits over here. Perhaps US indifference to how the stuff should be served is just a salutary hint to us to lighten up a bit.

That would explain the French too, of course. Teaching the British how to behave is very much a French national sport. Why, François Hollande was indulging in it yesterday, telling David Cameron that it was all very well for him to decide he wanted EU laws changed to suit him, but that didn’t mean the rest of Europe was going to go along with the idea. Least of all France.

Such a lot of symbolism riding on the cup that cheers. Just like back in Boston in 1773. It’s clearly much more than a mere beverage.

Enough of such deep thoughts. They’re enough to work up quite a thirst. Time for a cuppa, I reckon.

Just got to make sure the water’s piping hot before it hits the tea.