Hu-Kwa One of the ways my adult life has ended up different from my expectations of what adult life would be is that I have somehow ended up a coffee person rather than a tea person. Coffee, tea. Cat, dog. Mountain, beach. Chevy, Ford. Football, baseball. Boxers, briefs. Winter, summer. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.
Coffee is my one vice, I like to tell people when the conversation turns to the comfortable this-or-that, the binary quizzes we rely on as icebreakers and to reveal something (rather trivial) about ourselves to ourselves. Americans tend to answer dog, coffee, beach, Ford, football, briefs, and summer (and nothing on that last one), but when I was 12 or 13 I didn’t anticipate being like most Americans. I expected to be tea, dog, orchard, Carmen Ghia, cricket, silk teddy, autumn, and Tolstoy. How mundane we become, sitting at our breakfast table, eating our oatmeal.
I have to limit my coffee consumption to one large iced latte a day, in the morning, and if I cheat and have a second, nothing after 3 p.m. One time, after a bout of vertigo in 2017, I went cold turkey and quit drinking coffee altogether for about six months, for my health, but I found it basically impossible to have ideas or to write anything that wasn’t boring without my daily espresso dose. I am a different person without coffee (“quite literally,” as the bad writers say).
It was in Budapest at the age of 25 that I first started drinking it. Hungarian coffee is black and silty, the kissing cousin of Turkish coffee, and I feel retrospectively many times blessed that I experienced the kavehaz culture of that Middle European capital in the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the poets wore handknit stripey scarves and we wasted endless days wandering between the Muvesz Kavehaz, the Cafe New York, and the slightly seedy red-pleather banquette of the Soviet-era Bambi Eszpresszo. Coffee still sings to me with the Arabic scale — the scale of 17 half-steps that wafts a mood of mystery over the Western listener, like a whiff of hookah smoke — and I still vaguely associate my morning cuppa not with Joe but with the “Coffee Dance” from “The Nutcracker,” in which the ballerina holds her arms up like an Egyptian hieroglyph and slips to the stage floor in a slow split.
Ironically, my son, Teddy, who was born in the southern region of Ethiopia — that is, in the birthplace of coffee as a beverage, where even the humblest mud-and-wattle house roasts its own beans daily — is the master tea drinker in this house. Teddy has emulated his British dad and become defiantly dependent on his plug-in electric kettle for two, three, four, five, six servings of tea a day, with a modest dollop of whole milk for a light-caramel colored cup. He’s only 14 and I’ve already had to intervene to stop him from consuming more caffeine than is healthy for his growing bones. Teddy’s tea of choice is Clipper Organic Everyday Tea, “the Mighty and Rich one,” an ethically sourced sachet blended in a factory in Beaminster, Dorset, England. I was turned on to Clipper by a friend in Brighton, England, who pointed it out as a favorite when we were perusing the shelves of a health-food store called Seed N Sprout; I brought a somewhat flattened box of Clipper home in my luggage and now I have to buy new boxes regularly via Amazon.
Sometimes I have a private fad and go through a tin of, say, Russian Caravan from the marvelous Mark T. Wendell tea company of Acton, Mass. (established 1904), but mostly I only drink non-tea teas — herbal tisanes, mint, licorice, chamomile — at home, myself. This doesn’t stop me from reading carefully the tea descriptions in the Wendell catalog as if they were passages from an Edith Wharton novel, and buying specialties for friends and relations who may or may not appreciate the smokey, high-society allure of Hu-Kwa. If you are on my Christmas list, you are likely to receive a box of Lifeboat Tea, $10 for 80 teabags and benefiting the Royal National Lifeboat Association. When I first met Teddy’s dad, and invited him to fly from Vancouver Island, Canada, for a visit to East Hampton at Thanksgiving 2006, I put boxes of Yorkshire Gold from Taylors of Harrogate and Ty-Phoo in my cupboard, unsure which British brew he preferred, and wishing to be a pleasing hostess; it turned out he is a Tetley man. (How mundane we become, on closer inspection.) I also like to keep a box of Bigelow’s Constant Comment, which is spiced with orange peel and clove, in the pantry. Teddy is drinking that, rather begrudgingly this morning, as he waits for our next shipment of Clipper.
Both coffee and tea are the hot beverages of contemplation. I’m not sure why humans need hot beverages to assist us in contemplation, but we do. And if — as I enjoy this morning’s Illy espresso and Chobani Extra Creamy over ice — I examine more fully why I anticipated growing up to be a tea person, when I was 12, it becomes clear that it wasn’t the tea itself, it was the trappings and accouterments. Tea time is everything I love most in this world: the company of my children, my best friends, and a few random but chatty extra guests who bring gossip to the table. Spode china, tea towels with images from places I’ve only read about in Country Life magazine or Hilary Mantel (think wildflowers of Cornwall), a very small vase of sweet peas, and shortbread cookies on a plate.
If I had $600 I’d catch the next Queen Mary crossing from New York Harbor to Berth 46 in Southampton, Hampshire, and every single afternoon of the six days at sea I’d have afternoon tea with scones and clotted cream and sandwiches small enough to eat six. Cunard only serves Twinings, but fine. An orchestra plays and the passengers do ballroom maneuvers on a dance floor that rises and sways on the North Atlantic swells. And then I would spend a week in London, to inspect Monet’s views of the Thames at the Courtauld Gallery and the “Treasures of the British Library,” which weirdly I’ve never seen before, and I’d buy a ticket for Oldie Magazine’s Literary Lunch at the Liberal Club in Whitehall, even though I have no idea who the speakers are or what they’re talking about (something to do with Wilfred Owen). On my last day I’d go for fancy afternoon tea (all by myself, because my British friends think this is all idiotic) at the Goring hotel in Belgravia, where they serve a magnificent stack, a serried brick, of sandwiches — Coronation chicken, pheasant, egg, salmon — and there is Asprey Purple Water hand soap and lotion in the ladies’ room. Tea isn’t really about the tea, it’s about the tea sandwiches.