Teatime: An Introduction
Beatrice Hohengger THE QUESTION "D0 YOU TAKE SALT IN YOUR TEA?" was not uttered, as one might guess, by an absentminded hostess in an Oscar Wilde play, but it certainly could have been posed in earnest about fifteen hundred years ago in China. At that time, adding salt to tea was a common practice. Inquiring as to whether one took onions in one's tea would have been equally plausible, as tea was boiled and consumed soup-like with the addition of ingredients that we in the West might consider quite extraneous, among them ginger, spices, and orange peel - some of...