Time for tea: a guide to choosing, making, drinking and cooking with tea, from morning meals to evening bites

Tea has changed a lot since it was, as legend tells us, discovered by the Chinese Emperor Shennong in 2737BC. We’ve come a long way from the austere cup that was brewed when the leaf of a wild tea plant dropped into the emperor’s cup: we now have green tea latte, boba tea, yuen yeung tea (a mix of coffee and tea) and masala chai.

Tea drinking in Britain is so prevalent it’s almost a cliché. In his introduction to the book, Parker Bowles writes, “Ah tea. Both soothing and uplifting, a salve and a sharpener, the morning jolt and the evening’s end. It’s not so much mere drink as national obsession, a fragrant religion, sippable meditation, succour in a cup. Unashamedly democratic too, poured from silver tea pots and battered urns alike […]

“Tea unites this country. And divides it, too. Bag or loose leaf? A chipped mug of Builders’? Or a bone-china cup of first-flush Darjeeling? Which goes first, the tea or the milk? (If you take milk at all.) Sugar, honey? Or lemon? Or naked and unadorned? Oh, the agony of choice.

“And tea’s not just a cup of char. Rather afternoon tea, a meal in itself, a glorious tradition, one of Britain’s most enduring culinary gifts to the world. Cucumber sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, chocolate cake and crumpets drenched in butter. As Henry James said, ‘There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.’ And then there’s High Tea, a feast unto itself, where savoury is the order of the day. Washed down, of course, with lashings of tea […]