Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Posted by Miss Neddy at 03:15 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Flavoured

In the Song Dynasty and before, tea was cooked, not steeped, and often the water used boiling the tea was already infused with various ingredients, such as orange peels, osmanthus blossoms, and even salt. The tea leaves were usually pounded and ground into dust and compressed into dense cakes or bricks, and one would make a paste of the tea dust by pouring in hot water and stirring vigorously with a bamboo whisk.

After the Tang Dynasty, tea was more appreciated for its own flavour and so the practice of mixing various ingredients with it faded. In Tibet, Mongolia and certain minority groups through China, tea is still drunk in a similar fashion, either by mixing milk, butter or other ingredients with the tea leaves, but most Chinese would drink tea entirely on its own.

However, flower teas and flavoured teas are still fairly popular, by infusing the tea leaves during processing with fragrant flowers such as osmanthus, jasmine or rose, or fragrant fruits such as lychee, plum or orange; such teas are known as “flower teas” (花茶). Pure infusions, without tea leaves, are known in Chinese as “tea which is not tea” (茶非茶）。

Of the flower teas, perhaps the most famous are jasmine and osmanthus teas. Jasmine tea is so prevalant that the term “Fragrant Flakes” (香片) is assigned to jasmine-scented teas. Rose teas are rarer, since it is not a flower native to China, and its scent is overpowering, often to the detriment of the tea it infuses. Lychee black tea, or litchi red tea (荔枝红茶), is also common, although it is not the fruit that is used to infuse the tea leaves, but the drier and more fragrant peel. Lychee, by the way, was a favourite fruit of Yang Gui Fei 杨贵妃, a famous Imperial concubine in the Tang Dynasty, and one of the Four Beauties of Ancient China. “Gui Fei” 贵妃 was a status bestowed on her by the emperor, a rank of concubine not far below that of Empress; her real name was 杨玉环 or Yang Jade Ring, and according to records, she was plump and soft, like a peony in full bloom. (This digression reminds me of another tea, but I will leave that for another day.)

If you feel adventurous, you can make your own scented teas, by either obtaining flower infusions and mixing them with tea leaves, or putting flowers and peels into the boiling water you wish to use for steeping tea. However, should you do so, do not use clay teapots, as the scent of the flower or peel will seep into the teapot and your teas in the future will be contaminated with that flavour. It is best to use porcelain or glass teapots for this purpose.

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