Except Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. In the film, her Black Mamba character takes out a hundred ninja warriors, single-handedly, with a sword in a restaurant. She wears a yellow tracksuit with black stripes down the side, like Bruce Lee. Later in the film she wears a similar outfit in bike leathers. For my armour Brett designed and made me a dress that honours the sword-wielding restaurant assassin. She chose heavy yellow leather and fitted it with a zip down the front, opening top and bottom. It’s lined with soft black silk. Whenever I need to be brave, I wear Brett’s dress. It doesn’t allow me to stand back unnoticed, but nor do I have to barge my way in.
I fuel my courage with that dress. But it’s not always appropriate, and subtler methods may be required. More often, I gird myself with one of my favourite teas, the Dragon Well. It reminds me of the beautiful arsenal of pleasure I have behind me, a heavy artillery of deliciousness to decimate anyone who says, ‘Tea is just tea,’ or ‘Who cares?’
It took me many years of searching to get the perfect example of this tea, one of the most divine green teas on the planet. It pours steel down my backbone in the most delectable way.
It’s not just me. Chairman Mao also had a penchant for Dragon Well. In the seventeenth century, during the Qing dynasty, it was awarded the title of ‘Imperial Tea’ (Gong Cha). There are lots of stories about how the emperor came to admire this tea so much, but the one I favour has him hiding the leaves up his sleeves. He had been watching the pluckers moving artfully through the bushes and been so entranced that he followed their movements and picked his own leaf. At this moment a messenger brought him news that his mother was gravely ill, and he slipped the fresh leaves up his silken sleeve. Returning to his mother, he found the leaves pressed flat like feathers and dried by his hot skin. He infused them for his ailing parent. Of course, she immediately regained full health and the tea was suitably venerated.
It should have been easy to find. Dragon Well is from Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province. It’s not a secret. It’s still one of the most famous teas in China. The problem was I couldn’t find a good one, grown without pesticides or herbicides. It is such an admired tea in China, it fetches high prices. The growers on that famed terroir look to maximise production with the help of chemicals and reduce labour costs. The land and leaf are considered too precious to mess around with old-fashioned farming techniques. It’s a not dissimilar story to what’s happened with champagne in France or matcha in Uji. But I wanted something grown a bit differently, by a small producer who was doing things traditionally without the contrivances of Big Pharma. It took me years of asking the wrong questions of the right people. Finally I found what I was after, on the farm belonging to the parents of a woman who worked for a large exporter. The farm is just a small hill, dressed in fields, sloping down to a lake. Too small to be famous.
The leaf is picked in late March to early April, before the spring rains set in. I have a little sent ahead for tasting, testing and my own pleasure, before the bulk of it arrives, making its way, as it always has, on a slow boat. The carbon footprint of hand-crafted tea that is shipped by sea is relatively small. And there is no great rush. Modern technology allows tea to be packed and stored to preserve its freshness.
This wasn’t possible in the days of wooden tea chests. The ocean got in. The wind, and the rain, and the heat, and the waves, and the humidity, and the salt all acted against the precious leaf. And then the damp and cold of the wharf-side warehouses. A great emphasis was once placed on freshness and seasonality with tea, with some experts still suggesting you shouldn’t drink Dragon Well in the winter, it being past its best by then. But if tea is packed in small foil packets, it can now be kept in perfect condition, as fresh as it was when it left the garden. When you open only a small amount at a time, the air doesn’t have time to rob the leaves of their bright vivacity before you get the chance to drink it all. Keeping things small and light also stops the weight of leaves above from crushing those below. Tea is vulnerable to light and heat and, most especially, air and moisture. It’s better to buy small packets of well-packed tea than freshly picked tea in poor but pretty packaging. Paper, for example, is not an effective barrier; it’s used only because it’s cheap. Cellophane is little better. Even metal foils must be very thick to be completely impermeable. A sealed metal tin is the ticket. Recyclable and reusable.
If treated with care, tea can now be kept for years, but there is something about leaf fresh from the garden. Though the tea may not taste different from April to December, there is a quiet excitement in tasting the new harvest. Tea is dependent on the season, rainfall, temperature, humidity, days of cloud versus sun, all the myriad possibilities in nature that affect all growing things. It’s also reliant on the skill of the maker. I may have visited a farm many, many times and know the flavour of its teas intimately, but each new season holds unique flavours, making it a thrill to receive the first package of new leaves from the courier.
Dragon Well is the taste of spring. Sometimes you need that bright beginning on a frigid February day, or when you’re frozen, about to face a throng of people. A cup of Dragon Well takes me from dull grey to vivid green. It puts fresh sap in my brittle marrow. It tastes of wet grass and asparagus and fresh hazelnuts. Those first green tips of the year are like delicate spinach, with a smooth nutty finish. Some people describe Dragon Well as having notes of chestnut, but for me it is more resonant of hazel and there is a smooth mouthfeel that sets apart the finest grades. My mouth is watering as I write this and I’m almost able to go on the adventure of the tea without tasting it.
Hangzhou is one of the rare cities in China where chilli is an important element of the cuisine. Not Szechuan peppers but slices of fresh green and red chillies. The people are as proud of their food as they are of their tea. But these fiercer flavours have meant that their tea needs a richness to balance them. They developed Dragon Well to be smooth and sweet like the best Chinese green teas, but with a profundity and body that would stand the heat. It edges towards the vegetal depth of a Japanese sencha, but with a lightness all its own. It’s a contradiction of a tea, both light and heavy in flavour. It suits a contradictory state of mind, both timid and brave.
The first time I visited the tea gardens of Hangzhou I arrived a little too late. My tea business had got in the way of the real business of tea. The spring rains had already come and the harvesting was over. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, especially coming from Britain, to walk through fields of tea in warm air and soft rain that seeped under the umbrella and wicked up my clothes as I walked through the drenched bushes. The wet air was highly fragrant. I occasionally glimpsed the undulating terraces of the opposite hills and the lake below. Mostly it was just white air and the gleaming leaves of the bush in front of me. A momentary gap in the clouds would reveal the landscape in such a dazzling way that it was almost worth the misty blinkers. I was soon so sodden that my long skirts stuck to me like wrapping paper and I could hardly move.
Huddled in a concrete room beside a wood-burning stove, steam rose from my wet clothes as I took my first scalding sips. The accepted wisdom for brewing green tea is to use water at 70°C, and the Dragon Well is no exception. But that is not a hard and fast rule.
The farmer made the fresh tea for me, with water heated on the stove in an ancient, blackened, iron kettle, in the traditional Western manner using a tasting cup rather than a Chinese gaiwan. I suppose he thought I would be more comfortable. The tasting cup is a small straight-sided vessel with a handle and a lid. A two-centimetre section of the cup’s lip is serrated, like a little row of teeth. When the lid is placed on top of the cup, the teeth let the tea pour through, but, like a strainer, hold back the leaf. It comes with a special bowl, and the genius of the cup is that you can upturn it at a slight angle over the bowl and rest it there, with the lid staying in place, so that the tea strains into the bowl beneath without you having to hold it. This is particularly useful when comparing many teas at the same time. You fill several cups in rapid succ
ession, time the infusion, and turn them over almost instantaneously so that the teas strain uniformly.
The general rule for tea tasters using this method is 5g of tea to a full cup using boiling water and infusing for three minutes, the reasoning being that all teas can then be evaluated on an even playing field. But this was a method established by the British in India to evaluate black teas. Using the same leaf-to-water ratio and temperature is not the way to judge different types of tea, even different types of black tea. You can’t compare a roasted King Edward potato with a roasted new potato. A fresh Jersey Royal boils beautifully but won’t roast to a crispy-shelled, fluffy-centred companion to roast beef and gravy the way a King Edward would. Dragon Well is more akin to a Jersey Royal, one of the first fresh potatoes from the softening earth. She requires more delicate handling at lower temperatures to bring out her sweeter notes.
You may prefer to reveal some of her sharper edges, which requires higher temperatures. Or a long, cool steeping to release all the sugars without the tannins. I wasn’t sure what would work best. I had brought with me a bottle of water and having obediently tasted the teas in the aforementioned uniform way, I made the tea again with cooler water. I added my safe, bottled water to the boiled kettle and brought out a thermometer from my tasting kit. I tasted at varying temperatures from 60 to 90°C, also changing the infusion time, to really understand every nuance of the leaf and every flavour held.
He was a little surprised. Farmers are not geisha or tea ladies and they generally treat the tea with a little more simplicity. When I asked him how he made the tea, he was confused. It took me some time to explain that I wanted to know how he made his tea for himself.
He took two tall, thick water glasses like the ones used in schools, measured the leaf in his cupped hand and let the pressed feather shapes fall into the glasses. Then he half filled the glasses with boiling water, handed one to me and, blowing on the top of his, immediately began to sip. I tried to follow suit, wincing at the scalding water, blowing rapidly enough to hyperventilate. The first mouthfuls were just bloody hot and watery. We sipped steadily and, halfway through, the flavour started to develop. It took us a few intense minutes to drink our glasses dry, using our lips to strain the leaves, more a question of endurance than pleasure. (An old RAF veteran told me that they often didn’t have time to strain their tea. He would make it in a cup rather than in a teapot, between scrambles. He said he had the added advantage of a moustache to strain the leaves.)
The farmer then poured on fresh water, infusing the leaf a second time. The kettle had been left on the cold surface of the iron table and was a bit cooler now, and the sipping less painful and more enjoyable.
He offered me lunch and we sat together over some chillies, vegetables and rice. He told me the combination of flavours was perfect; I can’t tell you how they tasted, my mouth was too burnt.
MAKING DRAGON WELL
For a 150ml cup I would recommend using 2g of tea and water at 75°C, infused for sixty to ninety seconds.
CHAPTER 24
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA
A half-full teacup is soon emptied. The tea is cooler by that point and we drink it faster. I was just looking at mine a moment ago thinking, ‘Oh no, it’s almost gone.’ I do get a bit sad finishing a truly beautiful cup of tea. The first half you must take time over: it’s hot (hopefully not scalding) and you can take only small sips. You have the chance to savour the aromas, the smell of it, even before you get it anywhere near your lips. Do stop and smell the wet tea leaves too. They release all kinds of aromas, some of which, but not all, you’ll taste. To miss that would be to miss some of the great pleasure of the tea. There’s an intensity to the wet leaves that you just can’t get from the liquid.
In China they also believe that it’s worth savouring the aftertaste; indeed, the great masters evaluate the tea in several stages. First, there’s the aroma of the wet leaf, then the aroma of the cup, then the first taste as it hits your tongue, then the middle taste as it rolls around your mouth, the last taste as you swallow it and then the all-important flavour that’s left, residual, in your mouth. It’s why Chinese tasting cups are so small, like little thimbles, giving you just tiny sips of tea to savour.
Towards the end of the cup the liquid is cool, the aromas have dissipated and the tea slips down with less intensity. I’m not a half-empty type of person, but I am a realist.
I’m very grateful that there are places where I am invited to match teas to dishes, and some that even serve whole tea pairings alongside their wine pairings. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or discouraged, but the truth is it’s very rare. The hot pleasure of the experience is cooling in my cup.
Of course, there are restaurants that will serve you tea with your dinner, if you ask nicely, but it is still highly unusual outside Asia. Really good iced tea may find its way onto the table at lunchtime, but in the evening people tend towards something a bit stronger. And by stronger I don’t mean in flavour, I mean booze. To take tea to the dining table, it generally has to be hiding under the skirts of hard liquor.
You’ll have noticed the cocktail recipes I’ve included in these pages. There is a reason. To get people to truly fall in love with tea over the years, I’ve often had to get them a little drunk. Please don’t judge me too harshly. It’s an age-old ploy.
One long, steamy night in New Orleans my friend Jim Meehan and I made a whole restaurant of people swoon. Jim, author, barowner and all-round drink expert, and I set about pairing tea and rum punches with a rather good dinner. It was late July and hotter than a tin roof. It does seem a bit of a ridiculous time of year to have been in New Orleans, when temperatures soar and the humidity drenches, but New Orleans is beautiful, no matter the weather. And it’s when a rowdy festival takes place: Tales of the Cocktail.
I arrived to find an old swing band playing in the lobby of my hotel. From that moment on the music never really stopped. There was music in the street, music in the taxis, music in the bars and the restaurants and on the old wooden trolley-cars meandering through town. The city is populated by musicians, from the homeless under shady verandas to the chaps in suits playing old jazz in the fancy hotels. And it’s all good.
In the heat that makes you drip, it cools you. The whole town is cool, without pretension. They seem to have a thirst for good times. It’s not like anywhere else in the United States. New Orleans is a place distinctly its own, mired in old-school Southern snobbery and with its fair share of corruption and prejudice, but thriving and full of beauty and joy.
Tales of the Cocktail is an industry shindig that celebrates the world of booze and bartending and crowns the winners with awards. It’s not a one-night event like in the restaurant or film world, but a week-long rampage. The days are full of seminars hosted by industry experts and legends, about and involving alcohol. The big brands throw lavish parties, spunking millions of dollars to outdo one another. The whole city is taken over by bartenders who look like hipster clones, all bearded, with slick haircuts and sleeves of tattoos. The women unbearded. Everyone riotously drunk.
There are exceptions. Jim Meehan is a man who knows his stuff and is a rigorous expert on all things alcoholic, but he rarely drinks. He’s in his forties, older than most in his game, and wiser. He’s still there, stirring up the drinks world, and he has things to get done. Untattooed, shaven, soberly dressed in an ironed shirt and with an etched frown, he cuts a different dash among the very young crowd intent on debauch. I took my lead from him and kept myself fairly quiet, pacing myself, learning to leave delicious drinks unfinished so as to sample more.
I needed stamina to enjoy the verve of the city beyond the parties. And there was no lack of parties. If you had the right wristbands, they were endless, spilling over one another in a free-flowing torrent. It was enough to walk through and look at the scale of the extravaganzas, put on for thousands of guests and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, without much of Gatsby’s flamboyance. They were designed to impr
ess tattooed youths, not straw-hatted tea ladies. I escaped to quieter spots outside the fray.
Our big night came halfway through the week, when Jim and I put on a punch-pairing dinner. We hosted eighty-odd people and each course was paired with a punch made with rum and tea. The addition of tea to alcohol is both delicious and spiriting. Alcohol is a relaxant and a depressant. Tea is a stimulant. Together they make what I like to think of as the thinking woman’s vodka Red Bull.
Tea first found its way into drinks in punches. Long before Prohibition, punches were the first cocktails, made not in America but in Britain: balanced drinks combining different elements to make something even more delicious. Before mixers like tonic, fruit juice, sugary fizzy drinks or even safe water, there was tea, a delicious lengthener for neat spirits, to dilute delectably.
The best cocktails are made with precision and balance. The right tea with, or infused into, a spirit will sing at the right dilution, infusion time and ratio. I’m a bit disappointed if a bartender has used tea and I can spot it immediately. Tea is an ingredient. It should enhance a drink rather than dominate it. It might be there just to add depth, texture or mouthfeel as much as flavour. With so many teas from across the globe, with so many flavour profiles, you can add subtle, elusive layers to a beautiful drink.
When you have a group of thirsty people, you don’t want to get stuck in the kitchen or behind a bar mixing endlessly. A punch is the perfect solution: long and lovely and pre-batched. It takes the stress out of cocktails. Jim and I were able to make all the punches that hot summer night without breaking a sweat or the flowers falling from my hair. We had prepped everything so that we could effortlessly have each punch ready to serve at the right moment with each course, while we sat down to enjoy the dinner.
Infused Page 16