One for the Pot

Today

The days are getting longer and brighter and it's very easy to see just how much dust has collected. So, as part of another of my cleaning sprees, I washed every one of my 120 teapots.

I know how this collection started; with a gift of the famous motor car teapot given to Paul by a grateful patient. Our friends, as a joke, followed it up with a Charles & Di teapot and the collection was born. I don't know at what point it came to be considered as mine.

There are some basic rules: the teapot has to have a quirky or amusing design, be a real teapot and the handle, spout and lid should be an integral part of the design. Having said that, I never turned away the little pots (encouragingly marked "do not use hot water") given me by my many nephews and nieces.

For the first time since this blog was born Paul has made a suggestion as to editorial content. Not to squash this budding talent I include it. We were in Tesco today looking for tea. No, I don't mean PG tips or camomile tea, I mean tea. Tea that is spooned into a pot, subjected to boiling water and strained into a cup. Paul, whose passion for and ability to make good tea far outstrips mine, commented how hard it is today to find a good range of loose teas. I heard a while ago that this item has now been removed from the standard shopping basket that is used in calculating price fluctuations.

The point is, I may have about 120 crazy teapots but we also use a proper pot every day. It's a good round blue and white china pot with a natty little nylon infuser sitting under the lid. And every single cup of tea we have at home uses this pot.

In My Day

I do think that everyone used teapots when I was a child. Tea was spooned in from caddies "one per cup and one for the pot", boiling water added and the resulting potion drunk throughout the land. The commonest type of pot was a "Brown Betty" - these are still made today.

Daddy, of course, had his own ideas. He believed that tea was good but tannin bad (full of antioxidants, actually, Daddy). Putting leaves into the pot, pouring on the water and then leaving it for the time it takes to drink several cups, results in steadily strengthening tea and an increase in tannin. He also believe that warming the pot with water had a weakening effect on the brewing process. So Daddy used to put the tea into a jug, pour in the boiling water, let it stand, then strain it into the pot. The tea in the pot would stay uniformly at the desired strength, only gradually getting cooler.

I believe my brother David still uses this system, together with a nifty little wall-mounted tea dispenser.

I find it amazing that people today firstly use teabags, secondly pour on off-the-boil or reboiled water, and thirdly don't use a teapot.

Some historians believe that the industrial revolution could only have started in England when it was (before sewage) because we all drank strong tea which involved boiling water (killed the germs) tannin (a natural antibiotic) and which didn't make you drunk. With the art of tea-making fast dying out it's no wonder the country's done for.