More tea vicar?

The question of the week, though, is whether you put your milk in first or second: apparently this says more than you’d think about your heritage. And as usual with us Brits it all comes down to class. Back in the day the upper classes were in possession of fine porcelain tea cups as opposed to the working class’s earthenware mugs.

This is said to be a continuing practice from a time when porcelain (the only ceramic which could withstand boiling water) was only within the purchasing range of the rich - the less wealthy had access only to poor quality earthenware, which would crack unless milk was added first in order to lower the temperature of the tea as it was poured in. As a member of the upper classes, however, you could pour your tea in first, safe in the knowledge that your porcelain crockery was expensive enough to take it.

So there you have it – tea firsters stick that little finger out, milk firsters get back down the pit!

The rights and wrongs of milk first and tea first are debated ad nauseam. I’d like to confess now to being a tea first girl. The argument that tea needs to be as close to boiling as possible to brew properly makes milk last seem more sensible if you just haven’t got time to get the tea pot out.

There also seems to be an extremely complicated scientific debate raging about the effect of tea first or last on the chemical properties of milk. I can just about grasp the idea that adding the tea to the milk heats the milk gradually whereas dropping the milk in last heats it up in one go which tends to give it a boiled taste. I’m going to have to admit defeat in the pursuit of facts when they start talking about collagen/tannin complexes though.

It seems we owe several modern customs to the humble cup of tea. Coffee houses were popular gathering places for the London gentleman in the 18th century and on being introduced tea soon joined coffee as the beverage of choice.

According to one website of dedicated tea fans, auction houses find their origins here where enterprising merchants would auction their wares in a particularly busy tea house before purpose built auction houses existed.

This site also offers the charming, but sadly untrue, notion that if the coffee house was particularly busy customers would place money in a box labelled TIP which is where the idea of tipping comes from. Sadly the first flaw in this plan is that TIP is meant to stand for ‘to ensure promptness’, so unless everyone’s spelling was really bad in the 18th century, this seems a little hard to believe.

And if you’ve still got some unanswered questions about tea why not head to the UK tea council’s website?

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