Rooibos

I would never have liked rooibos were it not for Tick Tock's packaging. When I was on a collage meal plan, there were an assortment of tea bags, one of which was Tick Tock. Drawn by the bold white lettering on red, the fact that it said "rooibos" and "caffeine free" at the bottom completely passed by my attention. In other words, I mistook it for a brand of black tea, possibly akin to English breakfast.

(Not that I actually remember, but mistaking it for proper tea makes a better story than, say, drinking it because I wanted to avoid caffeine and had heard about rooibos. Because the point I'm trying to make is the allure of the packaging, not the benefits of decaffeinated beverages or the goodness of rooibos. But at some point, whether before or after I discovered Tick Tock I’m not sure, I was avoiding caffeine, having decided that coffee did terrible things to me. But even on that point I don’t know: was I reacting against coffee or black tea?)

It was only after a few days of drinking it that I realized that it tasted a bit strange. And come to think of it the color wasn’t right either. But I kept drinking it because it was Tea Time. I wanted to live the little picture on the box of cake and tea in a black pot.

Let us obsess over this picture. The picture’s small circular frame doesn’t show much, but what little it does suggests a whole scene. Although the framing feels somewhat incidental, the necessary elements of Tea are there: a teapot, two cups (not one), a milk pitcher, and a sugar bowl. The blue-stripe teaware is ornate yet rustic and set on a wooden table. The cake, too, straddles fanciness and simplicity. Yes, it is layered and trimmed, but one does not have to be a patisserie to make this cake, just a cook. I am tempted to say that this is colonial Tea rather than English Tea, which is not particularly surprising because this brand makes much of its being “from the founders of rooibos,” who of course were in South Africa. So the picture may be imagined as an image of how “the founders of rooibos” drank their rooibos back in 1903. Before Tick Tock came to bring us rooibos, we are to understand, there was this scene.

But I’m interested in the cake. It takes up a great deal of the frame. And I can’t seem to read its three-dimensional aspect. The problem is the top, which looks like icing, except that it has these strange dark swirls in it, and the top edge is irregular. So perhaps it’s a very fluffy topping, like a meringue. Except that while the left edge and the shape of the top edge suggests that the cake is sloping, the cut on the right shows it to be straight. But if the top of the cake is flat, why are there dark swirls, and why is the top edge irregular rather than smooth?

More than anything else, though, I want to know what kind of cake this is. Because obviously whoever painted this must have had a type of cake he or she was painting. All I can say is that it is yellow.

I think it’s time to make a yellow cake and drink rooibos brewed from loose leaves, longing for my longing for Tea.

To write this blog is to find new ways of describing how food is disgusting.

I hate cooking. Have I mentioned that? Also I want to do nothing but cook.

On the one hand, the need to eat is an obstacle to the rest of life. I don't want to have to eat. But I'm always eating to preempt hunger--not so much a a desire to eat as a visceral awareness that I need to eat. Hastily and begrudgingly I try to fill myself with adequate food so that I can get on with life. Can’t I get this over with?

Most mornings all I really want is tea. I want to have my time with tea, or I should say of tea: it is supposed to pull me out of time’s regular flow into tea time. Tea is in this way a kind of pastry. However tea is in reality never enjoyable by itself. One has to be enjoying something else--to be enveloped by, focused on, or occupied by something else for tea time to happen (or not happen) at all, if it does. Usually, lacking in some other enjoyment, tea time really is no time at all, in the wrong way. It passes quickly, bringing me almost immediately to tepid sloshings of acrid, camel liquid--then out of (in the sense of having run out) but very much in time and out of tea. So, dispassionataely, I cook breakfast out of necessity. This is how I hate cooking.

On the other hand I want the same impossible thing from cooking that I want from tea. I want to escape through cooking. I want the process to be involving enough that I forget everything else. I want a kind of productivity for which there is no need. The taste of the results, really, is not all that important.

Biscotti are dry, crumbly, tasteless things. Hunks of stuff to have with coffee. By themselves they are blah. Good coffee has a slight aroma of shit. This is an incomplete metaphor that doesn’t work; it doesn’t just leave a slight trace behind, it leaves whole swaths fallow.

One can’t not eat, and one can’t only cook--then one would be a cook, and would have to get one’s jollies elsewhere.

This is a tea commercial and the slogan is "taste the secret."

Generally I poo-poo herbal tea.  When I do drink herbal teas, it is ginger or chamomile.  I think this is because I don't have for it one of those yet-unnamed "way in which food compels," which I'm tempted at the moment to call exoticization.  But I'll let the terminology simmer for now.  Instead I'll illustrate the appreciation I don't have for herbal tea with a scenario.

You're in Starbucks.  There are too many things there, but to simplify the situation you could get coffee or you could get tea.  Coffee seems the safe option, as they are in the business of coffee, after all.  If you get tea it will probably come in a bag and be brought stewing in lukewarm water.  But you're not after fine or well-brewed tea.  You're not here to be picky and get what you expect.  You get some herbal infusion full of arcane-sounding fruits, herbs, and spices and named after some far-flung locale.  It's not that you care particularly what's in it or what it's called--these are all just allusions to what you want.  You put your nose to the steam swirling from the cup and feel like you're privvy to a secret.  The aroma taps you into the ephemera of some other life lost to nearly everyone else.  They're all drinking coffee.

That whole scenario is a lie.  It's the addressed who leads "some other life lost to nearly everyone else," which, through an imagined appreciation of tea, I wish to access in the same manner.

Ginger Tea

This is very much not the ginger tea at Koshy's, which is steeped.  Maybe it would have been more appropriate to call this "ginger chai," but then some might have gotten the impression that it's like a Starbucks Chai Latte, but with more ginger.  A more accurate name such as "boiled ginger tea" just sounds nasty to me despite the fact that I boil my tea to death just about every morning these days.

2 small slices fresh ginger

2 teaspoons Assam CTC

1 cup water

1/2 cup milk

3 teaspoons sugar or 2 1/2 teaspoons honey

Combine water, milk, and fresh ginger in a small saucepan and bring to a boil on high heat.  When milky water boils it will foam.  At this point quickly add tea and remove from heat to prevent it from boiling over.  After 40 seconds put saucepan back on heat and boil once more.  Immediately strain into a mug.  Remove ginger from strainer, rinse off, and plop into mug.  Stir in sugar.  Drink immediately.

ham tea

1 tablespoon spoiled milk
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cups water
1 tea bag

boil water
pour water into cup with tea bag
cover for a minute
take out tea bag
add sugar and spoiled milk
stir

"why does this tea smell like ham?"