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Passion in a Teacup
By Stephen Herold
Feb 28, 2002 -- To me the most obvious sign of America's coming out from the basic meat and potatoes simplicity that marked our growth from colonial outpost to world empire is my stomach. Even 30 years ago Seattle had a restaurant scene that left little to the imagination and less to the taste buds. A fancy meal meant a big steak, and ordinary meals marched quickly from the meat to the starch, with perhaps a side trip of a vegetable, followed by a quick coda of dessert. Hunger drove us on where desire was both lacking and inappropriate.It was the same with our beverages, but more so. Coffee was the American hot drink, and its standard was merely that it be hot, brown and undistinguished while being mixed with much sugar and something white. Increasingly we dared not ask what that white substance was. Tea came in bags and old ladies drank it because they were too feeble to handle coffee. I had an early clarion call against this narrow world when, in 1959, my classmate David Flory introduced me to Twinings Earl Grey tea which he drank at every meal. Trips to Vancouver B.C. in the '60s, where I tried every kind of tea from Murchies, taught me that life had much more to give than my birthright promised.
Over the years we have awakened to the possibilities of food and beverages and now live in a world of lattes and cappuccinos with quaint and exotic teahouses around many corners. Yet, if you talk to the customers who drink these things they seem to know so little of what they are drinking. One coffee bean is much like another to them and the tea names are all a foreign blur. We would never go into a restaurant and ask for 'food' but we ask for 'coffee' or 'tea' without a thought. Few books worth reading have been written on beverages and fewer are read. In this wasteland some shine brightly, and The Agony of the Leaves by Helen Gustafson is both a tale of personal pilgrimage and an enlightenment.
Helen worked at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters' culinary gift to the world and one of the greatest restaurants of all time, where she introduced the serving of teas worthy of the cuisine. Both daring and successful, this venture gave tea a new image and fashion in the Bay area and extended the dining pleasure of many who had never thought of tea as belonging in gourmet establishments. The effort was so interesting and filled with challenges that it induced Helen Gustafson to write her book on her life with tea and Chez Panisse.
A personal tea history, a menu-filled blueprint for lovely tea-times and a collection of charming insights are all apt descriptions of this book. Childhood tea parties in St. Paul are followed by tales of academic sophistication, foreign adventures and adult discoveries. With a prose that is every bit as delightful as M.F.K. Fisher's, she shares tea parties and London tea auctions, high teas and oriental rarities and lets us meet the mentors of her personal growth. How can we ignore such stories as this?
"On an off-the-beaten-track San Francisco street, a street that was dirty, dismal, nondescript, and lonely London gray, I found the tea room of my dreams. Far from the fashionable or even the friendly districts of the city, it was located in a Beaux Arts stucco hulk that had been built as a house of worship, but had until recently housed a School of Mortuary Science. Now, in its decay, it sheltered the Waters Upton Tea Room. It had the grim aspect of the scene of the crime in an Agatha Christie mystery."
Nothing better than sipping a cup of hot tea with this book in your lap.
Stephen Herold operates the Wit's End Bookstore in Fremont, and can usually be found there during open hours.
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