The World of Caffeine

by Weinberg, Bennett Alan, Bealer, Bonnie K.

  At least two Englishwomen did far more to promote the cause of tea than merely drinking it. The first was Mary Tuke, an early tea importer, and the second was Anna, wife of the seventh duke of Bedford, credited with creating the hallowed custom of afternoon tea.

  In 1725, under the reign of George I, when Robert Walpole was prime minister and nearly fifty years before the advent of the industrial revolution in England, a thirty-year-old unmarried woman of York, her parents long dead, decided to go into business as a tea merchant. In those days, permission to trade in York depended on being a freeman of the city and member of the York Merchant Adventurers’ Company. The first qualification posed no difficulty for Tuke, whose father had been a freeman, and who thereby inherited the same status. She entered her name in the Roll of the Freemen of the City of York in 1725, “Maria Tewk, Spinster, Fil. Willelmi Tuke.” However, a woman who was neither the widow nor daughter of a member of the company was deemed ineligible for membership, and so she could not obtain a license to trade.

  Undeterred by fears of consequences, she opened her business, ignoring threats and indictments from the company and fines for “Merchandising and following Trade without being free of this Fellowship.” Fortunately, imprisonment for failure to pay fines required a special act of Parliament, the passage of which would have incurred a bigger expense than the company was willing to spend on a renegade like Tuke. In any case, Mary Tuke prevailed. After seven years of conflict, the Merchant Adventurers’ Company imposed, and she agree to pay, a modest fine, after which she was permitted to pursue her business without further obstruction.

  R.O.Mennell, one of Tuke’s distant descendants, in a charming little book published in 1926, proudly recounts the significance of his ancestor’s actions:65

  This particular instance of a woman challenging and defeating a powerful monopoly was of historic significance, as showing how the old restrictions were thrown off as a result of the determined courage of a few strong minded individuals. Thus Mary Tuke not merely founded a firm which, handed down through seven generations of the same family, still flourishes, but by her pertinacity helped to mould the character of the eighteenth century.66

  In 1746, while the French were attempting to drive the English from India, Mary’s fourteen-year-old nephew, William Tuke, began an apprenticeship to her that was to last for six years. When he was only twenty, she died and left the business and property to him. After a rough start, he became extremely successful and controlled the thriving business for sixty-two years.

  Tea adulteration, which had become a concern since the first shipments arrived from China, remained significant. Among the Tuke firm’s archives is a copy of an interesting contemporary act, 4 Geo. II cap. 14, by which it was decreed that fines would be levied on any dealer who “shall dye, fabricate or manufacture any Sloe leaves, Liquorice leaves, or the leaves of tea that have been used, or the leaves of any other tree, shrub or plant, in imitation of tea, or shall mix, colour, stain or dye such leaves or tea with terra japonica, sugar, molasses, clay, logwood, or with any other ingredients or materials whatsoever.”67 As evidence shows that the practice was increasing rather than abating, this edict may have served more as an advertisement of various methods of adulteration than as a deterrent against them. As a defense against this practice, John Horniman began selling measured amounts of tea in sealed paper packets. His company was later acquired by the two teenage Tetley brothers, and the use of tea bags became a general practice.68

  Among the English, the ceremony and institution of afternoon tea has had the unifying force of the old Latin Mass in the Catholic Church. After all, like the members of the one true church, the English have long fancied themselves members of the one truly civilized society on earth, a claim that was bolstered by the fact that wherever in the world he was or whatever he was doing, every Englishman of any station throughout the empire reputedly observed the afternoon break for tea. This custom is still followed in situations Americans might find surprising. For example, international cricket matches in England, which of themselves demand almost supernal patience, are made still more spiritually challenging when interrupted at four o’clock for afternoon tea.

  Tea has a habit of becoming identified with the best features of a civilization that sees itself as a refined and accomplished culture. Not only has it become so identified in England, but the traditions of China and, as we have seen, especially of Japan, elevate tea to the status of an emblem for their society and civilization. Afternoon tea, the introduction of which is credited to Anna of Bedford (1788–1861), epitomizes the meaning of tea in English life. Like the tea ceremony of Japan, the English afternoon tea did not spring full-grown into the world, but has a long and sometimes uncertain history.

  The Tea, by American Impressionist Mary Cassatt, 1880. One of Cassatt’s most popular paintings, it shows two young women enjoying the decorous ritual of afternoon tea. (M.Theresa B.Hopkins Fund. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved)

  Almost from its earliest use in English, the word “tea” referred not only to the plant and the beverage but also to an occasion such as a reception where tea was served. The use of the word to refer to a light evening meal or supper, with tea as the accompanying beverage, first occurs in the eighteenth century. For example, John Wesley (1703–91), founder of Methodism, reported in 1780 that he encountered all the important persons of society “at breakfast and at tea,” which suggests that tea was an acknowledged repast at that time. High tea, or “meat tea,” which is sometimes confused by Americans with afternoon tea, is a full meal and came into existence sometime later, but exactly when is unknown.

  At the time of Anna, the duchess of Bedford, the English ate large breakfasts, generally served with tea, snacked informally for lunch, and waited until eight in the evening to have their dinner, after which they also drank tea. Anna was one of the many people who experience a profound afternoon slump. To relieve what she called the “sinking feeling,” she is reputed to have directed her servants to bring her a tray of tea, bread and butter, and cake around four o’clock. This little repast picked her up so effectively that she busied herself spreading the new custom among her aristocratic friends and acquaintances.

  By the 1880s, Anna’s invention had become a daily event, for which ladies, following an afternoon carriage ride, changed their costume and donned long tea gowns in expectation of the elegant ritual of refreshment. Meanwhile, the tea service, like its Japanese ceremonial counterpart, continued to evolve in sophistication, elaboration, and delicacy, including bread and butter plates and cake stands. By the turn of the twentieth century, wealthy Englishwomen and their escorts were able to take their tea at fancy establishments, the most famous of which was Rumpelmeyer’s. When the rage became international, establishments named “Rumpelmeyer’s,” in imitation of the original, were opened in Paris and elsewhere. Another Rumpelmeyer’s, in the St. Moritz on Central Park West, New York, still stands and was ambitiously redecorated in deco style in 1996.

  Caffeine in Victorian and Contemporary England

  It is difficult today to grasp how unsafe were most beverages available even in highly developed countries before the twentieth century. Because of the pure water shortage, even alcoholic drinks were regarded primarily as thirst quenchers. Despite increased investments in water companies after 1805, outbreaks of water-borne diseases created several scandals over succeeding years. In the 1820s it became difficult for Londoners to find any drinking water, which created a new profession: water carrier. London hospitals served their patients only alcoholic drinks, and they were prudent to do so. In the 1840s it was an open secret that the poorer quarters of London were supplied with water that was clearly unfit for human use. In the 1850s private water supplies remained scarce and the city had few public pumps. At this time, even in upper-class households, water supply from the mains was intermittent, and only when the wooden pipes were replaced with iron one
s would the shortages be alleviated.

  Other sources of liquid refreshment were just as bad. Milk was dangerous even when fresh, and it was of poor quality or even adulterated, especially in the anonymously produced supplies reaching the city. In addition, this bad milk was very expensive and around 1850 was double the price of beer. Carbonated soda water was not sold in England until after 1790, and no Parisian-style limonadiers wandered the streets to slake the thirst of passersby. London residents were wise to rely on intoxicants, for which the water had been pumped from deep wells, or on the temperance drinks, coffee, tea, and chocolate, for which the water had been boiled. Adulteration of foodstuffs was still an unpleasant and nearly unavoidable fact of life, as it had been in Mary Tuke’s day. In a poem called “London Adulterations” published in 1825, the anonymous author laments these depredations:69

  Here tradesmen, ‘tis plain, at no roguery stops.

  They adulterate everything they ‘ve in their shop;

  You must buy what they sell, and they sell what they please,

  And they would, if they could, sell the moon for green cheese.

  Now it is well known imitation’s the rage:

  Everything’s imitated in this fair old age;

  There’s tea, coffee, beer, butter, gin, milk, in brief,

  No doubt they’ll soon imitate mutton and beef.

  The grocer sells ash leaves and sloe leaves for tea,

  Tinged with Dutch pink and vertigris, just like bohea [tea],

  What sloe poison means Sloman70 now has found out;

  We shall all to a T be poisoned, no doubt.

  Some grocers for pepper sell trash called PD71;

  Burnt horse beans for coffee—how can such things be?

  The milkman, although he is honest, he vows,

  Milks his pump night and morn quite as oft as his cows;

  Claps plenty of chalk in your score—what a bilk—

  And, egad, claps you plenty of chalk in your milk.72

  However, the cost of the nonalcoholic drinks, still high, was falling, and by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century these drinks became more available for home consumption. By the 1880s tea had declined in price so far that it had become a necessary fixture in working-class homes. Unfortunately, how much of this “tea” was actually Camellia sinensis is doubtful. The demand for tea created a large market in ersatz tea, actually compounded of blackthorn leaves and other substitutes, colored to make them resemble true tea. As Daniel Pool states, “The government estimated that for every seven pounds of authentic East India tea being sold under the monopoly, there were four phony pounds being sold to unsuspecting buyers.” By the 1840s, the plight of tea drinkers was further exacerbated by the operations of eight London factories, “busily recycling used tea leaves, often dyeing them and then mixing them with new tea for resale.”73 Perhaps eighty thousand pounds of tea were recycled annually in this way.

  The reductions on duties on coffee enacted in 1808 and the subsequent renaissance in the London coffeehouses boosted coffee sales rapidly through the 1850s. In 1815 there were no more than a dozen coffeehouses in London. In 1821 William Lovett (1800–1887), an English writer and cartographer, found “comparatively few” and was forced to eat in a tavern. Further reductions in duties in 1825 helped to change this picture dramatically. By 1830, coffee had finally become cheap enough to compete with beer. As a result, coffeehouses began to open in greater numbers and reinstituted the custom of providing newspapers for the enjoyment of their patrons.

  Chocolate was still a minor player in the story of English beverages. Van Houten’s invention of the modern process for making cacao was made only in 1828, and in 1830 John Cleave, a London merchant, was able to advertise chocolate as a “new beverage” called “theobroma.” The word “cocoa” was not generally in use until after 1840.

  Despite all these developments, alcoholic drinks remained the cheapest and, because of the prevalence of the adulteration of milk and the temperance drinks, arguably the safest refreshments available. In 1830, a pint of coffee cost about three pence, at least twice the cost of gin or ale. In 1840, coffee cost about one and a half shillings a cup, tea about two shillings a cup, and chocolate about four shillings a cup. In comparison, at this same time, a decent pint of porter, a dark brown bitter beer, was only two and a half shillings. By later Victorian times, coffee and tea had been fully integrated into the roster of necessaries kept and used in every workingclass household. In “How Five and Twenty Shillings Were Expended in a Week,” a poem published in an 1876 Birmingham broadside, a housewife accounts for her weekly expenditures for coffee, tea, alcohol, and the occasional luxury of soda pop:

  It’s of a tradesman and his wife,

  I heard the other day,

  Who did kick up a glorious row,

  They live across the way.

  The husband proved himself a fool,

  When his money was all spent,

  He called upon his wife, my life,

  To know which way it went.

  So she reckoned up and showed him,

  And she showed him all complete,

  How five and twenty shillings was

  Expended in a week.

  ....

  There is two and threepence house rent,

  Now attend to me, she said:

  There is four shillings goes for meat,

  And three and ninepence bread;

  To wash your nasty dirty shirt

  There is sixpence-halfpenny soap,

  There’s one and eightpence coals, old boy,

  And tenpence wood and coke.

  There’s fourpence for milk and cream,

  And one and twopence malt,

  Three halfpence goes for vinegar

  And twopence halfpenny salt;

  …

  A shilling potatoes, herbs and greens,

  Tenpence butter now you see,

  Sixpence coffee, eightpence sugar,

  And one and fourpence tea.

  …

  There’s eightpence for tobacco,

  And seven-farthings swipes,

  …

  There is threepence halfpenny snuff,

  And two pence halfpenny tripes;

  A penny you owed for strings

  Over at the cobbler’s shop.

  And you know last Sunday morning

  You had a bottle of ginger pop.

  And while every night to a public house

  You go to drink and sing,

  I go to the wine vaults over the way

  To have a drop of gin.74

  As the saga of caffeine in England continues today, coffee remains popular, and soft drinks have become an important part of the new mix, but tea continues to be England’s most important source of the drug. Consider that in America, the country of coffee bibbers, about half of all caffeine comes from coffee; in England, more than three-quarters of the caffeine consumed comes from tea. England and her cousins, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, constitute four of the twelve top tea-consuming countries in the world per capita, and they are the only Western nations to make the list.75 England makes, sells, serves, and consumes, imports, and exports tremendous quantities every year.

  Like the queen and Buckingham Palace, the afternoon tea, although it has declined in importance among the natives since World War II, has become a major tourist profit center. Establishments such as the Ritz hotel and Fortnum and Masons department store serve afternoon tea in a sometimes hectic environment that would have seemed like a nightmare to its originators. Nevertheless, the aristocratic patina of the afternoon tea, an inheritance from generations of English ladies, from Queen Catherine, through Anne of Bedford, and one reminiscent of the upper-class connections of the Urasenke tea masters, remains to this day. An attempt to capture and trade off this patina is evident in four-star hotels throughout the world that serve afternoon tea daily in a quiet, decorous setting, presented by a discreet serving staff and accompanied by the finest tea service th
at the establishment can afford. There, twentieth-century ladies and sometimes gentlemen meet to inhale a breath of the atmosphere of elegance and tranquillity that have been associated with tea over the centuries.

  11

  the endless simmes

  America and the Twentieth Century Do Caffeine

  ZING! What a feeling

  —Line from Coca-Cola jingle, 1960s

  Captain John Smith, who founded the colony of Virginia at Jamestown in 1607, brought the earliest firsthand knowledge of coffee to North America and is sometimes credited with having been the first to bring the beans as well. Smith was familiar with coffee from having traveled through Turkey. Neither the passengers of the Mayflower in 1620 nor the first Dutch settlers of Manhattan in 1624 are recorded to have included any tea or coffee in their cargo. It is impossible to be sure if the Dutch introduced either into their colony of New Amsterdam or whether that distinction belongs to the British, who succeeded them in 1664 and renamed the settlement “New York.” In any case, by the time of the earliest printed reference to coffee drinking in America, which occurs in New York in 1668, the drink, brewed from roasted beans, sweetened with sugar, and spiced with cinnamon, was already in common use. Around this time coffee seems to have displaced beer as the favorite breakfast beverage, and chocolate is recorded to have arrived in small private shipments, primarily as a pharmaceutical. In 1683 William Penn, who probably introduced both coffee and tea into Philadelphia, recorded in his Accounts that he purchased coffee in New York for his year-old Pennsylvania settlement and complained of the price per pound of eighteen shillings nine pence. At this price, the beans required to make a cup of coffee would have cost more than a dinner at an “ordinary,” or informal eatery, of the time. In light of this expense, it is not surprising that, during these first days in the colonies, beer and ale remained the usual drinks at meals other than breakfast, and both tea and coffee were pricey luxuries, with tea the more common of the two, especially in domestic use.