An American professor has created an international incident by suggesting that tea drinkers add a pinch of salt to their brew.
Part of the charm of a nice cup of tea is how little time it takes to make it. And how little fuss is involved. For years, PG Tips, one popular brand in Britain, was advertised using chimpanzees, the subliminal message, clearly, was that this stuff isn’t difficult.
All that’s needed is a cup and saucer or mug, a teapot, a teabag or two, boiling water, milk (slices of lemon are for cocktails), and, for me anyway, sugar.
The ideal brand of tea is PG Tips Gold (much better, as its name would suggest than standard PG Tips). Earl Grey? No. It’s insipid, nasty, faintly reminiscent of soap, and, damningly, relished by Jean-Luc Picard, snooty Captain Prime Directive himself.
Ideally, the water should be “soft.” In the part of England where my parents lived, the water was harder than Chuck Norris, meaning that, with the miraculous exception of PG Tips Gold, their offerings of tea were best avoided.
But now an American academic, Michelle Francl, a professor of chemistry from Bryn Mawr, has come forward with her recommendations on how to make a better cup of tea. These can be found in a new book, Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea, and one of them has raised eyebrows over the Atlantic.
Last night, Professor Francl insisted her findings were solid, despite coming from a country where tea plays second fiddle to coffee — and is usually served iced.
Some of her suggestions were common sense (don’t steep the tea bag for too long, don’t microwave your tea), if extravagant (only use a tea bag once). Adding milk after the tea is sound advice so far as temperature control is concerned. Not all agree.
Francl recommends using a “short and stout mug to keep your tea hotter.” Fine, fine, although I don’t know where cups are supposed to fit into this.
But then things start getting finicky, very finicky:
Use warm milk “to reduce the chance of curdling.” Preheat the cup or pot to release more of the tea’s “aromatic compounds.”
A small squeeze of lemon juice “can remove the ‘scum’ that sometimes appears on the surface of the drink.”
Who has time for this?
Francl is probably right that tea leaves are preferable to tea bags, but life is short.
The real trouble came with Francl’s advice that tea drinkers should add a pinch of salt to their brew. #Science, apparently: “The sodium ion in salt blocks the chemical mechanism that makes tea taste bitter.”
Salt?
Well, as the saying goes, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Maybe the professor is right, but having once seen the face of an uncle who started to drink some tea into which he had put salt rather than sugar, I can see this being a process that involves care and a great deal of trial and error.
Salt.
The comments section on the Daily Mail went into meltdown [Note: It is rarely not in meltdown]. “Like we need help from the Americans on making tea. Who do you think you’re talking to, the French?” said one Mail reader.
To calm the diplomatic waters, the U.S. embassy in London decided to get involved, putting out a press release saying that tea is “the elixir of camaraderie, a sacred bond that unites our nations. We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our Special Relationship.”
It went on: “We want to ensure the good people of the UK that the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”
But just when everything was going so well: “The U.S. Embassy will continue to make tea in the proper way — by microwaving it.”
The U.K. had not declared war on the U.S. at the time of publication.