Coffee and Tea

Peter Wu

17 Dec 2010

For several decades before 1660, people in Britain were vaguely familiar with coffee. It was something they encountered abroad, described as ‘blacke as soot, and tasting not much unlike it’. Drinking coffee in those days was very much a novelty. Along came Pasqua Rosee, who was Sicilian by birth and Greek by background, who opened the first coffee shop in London in 1652. He promoted coffee for its health benefit, claiming that it cured or prevented headaches, wind, gout, scurvy, mis-carriages, sore eyes and much else. It caught on. By 1656, more than 80 coffee houses were in business in London and they had become a central part of the life of the city, like it is now.

Tea became popular after 1696, when the tax on it was massively cut. And the effect on consumption was immediate. Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredth folds, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750. The seed for the Opium War was planted at about this time. Tea was taken at breakfast, dinner, supper and whenever. A daily ritual we take for granted today, the morning and afternoon tea breaks, had it origin at this time. Its popularity took off when it was discovered it went well with sugar. Britons came to adore sweet, milky tea as no other nation had. Milk was added to tea to cool it quickly so people can drink it almost right away.

The British had always loved sugar, so much so that when they first got access to it, they put in on almost everything – on eggs, meat, wines, potatoes, salads. Though it was rather expensive at the time, people consumed it until their teeth turned black. Even if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

As with coffee, tea was held to confer health benefits. It was said that it ‘assuageth the pains of the bowels’, however that may mean. A Dutch doctor, Cornelius Bontekoe, recommended drinking fifty cups of tea a day and, in extreme cases, as many as 200, in order to keep oneself sufficiently primed.

Assuming each tea cup holds 300 ml of liquid (a can of Coke holds 375 ml), drinking 50 cups a day mean taking the equivalent of 15 litres of liquid and drinking 200 cups, 60 litres of liquid. Water torture takes on a new meaning if you drink that much.