Tea, Now and Then

Cuppa tea?

When I first moved to Canada, I was surprised to be offered tea wherever I went. Tea, not coffee, was—and is—the sociable drink. Often, but not always, offered with something sweet. My dad sometimes drank tea, but as a child I associated it with illness. Weak, tepid tea with sugar was offered as a remedy for whatever ailed you. A sort of medicinal treat that made me feel both grown up and pampered, and probably did nothing to sooth an upset stomach or relieve a head cold.

I’ve never really become a tea person, but after decades of sipping it at the tables and in the living rooms of friends, I no longer associate it with illness. It now speaks to me of the intimacy of shared confidences, the warmth of an understanding friend, and the comfort of familiar surroundings. 

I wonder if, all his life, my Dad associated it with Pop’s store, and if the aroma of a cup of hot tea transported him back in time. It’s long past the time I could ask, but his recollections about tea in his book, My Pop The Grocer,suggest it was so.

Most of the people in the little town of Bangor, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, worked in slate quarries or in textile mills.  The quarrymen were mostly Welshmen.  Many of the millworkers were Italian.  And the farmers who came into town on Saturday nights were mostly Pennsylvania Dutch. The Italians grew most of their own food, and came into Pop’s grocery store for a pickle on the way to work. The Pennsylvania Dutch farmers didn’t need to buy much, but what they did need they bought from Pop’s store because Pop’s wife, my Grammy Smith, was one of them and spoke their language. But, according to Dad, it was the Welsh who needed a special kind of grocer—for saffron and spices and, especially, tea.

From My Pop The Grocer…

The tea was kept behind the counter at the back of the store in tall tin canisters lined up side by side.  They reminded me of the row of tall square organ pipes in church, though naturally on a smaller scale.  At the bottom of each canister there was a little door, hinged at the bottom so that when it was pulled open the tea would stay in its little enclosure and not simply pour out onto the floor.  The canisters had openings with lids at the top for refilling.  Each canister had its own smell, and if you opened up the little doors all along the row (as I sometimes would) you would get a scale of aromas unlike anything else in the world.

On the counter nearby was a small notebook where Pop had put down the kinds of tea preferred by some of the Welsh ladies. It ran something like this:
 Mrs. Evans:     4 oz. Japan green, 4 oz. China oolong
 Mrs. Davis:      4 oz. black Ceylon, 2 oz. Hyson, 2 oz. Gunpowder
The Roberts Sisters: 2 oz. black India, 2 oz. Pekoe Souchong, 3 oz. black Java, 1 oz. green Burma

These measurements would have to be made by tiny scoopfuls into a small paper bag, and then thoroughly shaken together with a soft rustling sound…

Long ago—I never knew how or when—Pop had found “a good buy” in tea, and stocked enough to last him for his career as a grocer.  For each variety contained in the “organ pipes” there was a giant cube in the cellar…

To fill the tea canisters Pop needed my help—or maybe he had some idea of how much of an adventure it was for me.  We had to go outside and open doors that were set into the front pavement and go down rickety stairs into a kind of damp dungeon. We had to carry flashlights because there was no other light down there.  It was simply a space dug out of the ground under the store.  Pop needed this storage space because he often bought supplies that would last him for a long time.  They had to be in cans or tight cases to last down there, and they were stacked up to the low ceiling with only narrow paths left to walk through. 

Way in the back, propped up off the dirt floor, were the great coffers of tea.  The cubes were made of metal and they were covered with a woven straw matting.  On the matting were old oriental labels.  Inside the casings were more heavy wrappings before you came to the tea itself.

Now the tea belonged to Pop and it was his cellar. Yet we quietly scooped the tea into the canisters as if we were stealing it!  Perhaps it was the aroma, which was almost overpowering.  Anyway I felt that we had crawled through a secret underground tunnel to where this treasure was, and that we were robbing some frightful overlord of his magic jewels, or that we were setting free some genie from the boxes. I kept waiting for the crash of the gong or cymbals that would announce our capture by the lord’s faithful slave. It was almost a relief to finish our job and seal the heavy odors (and the genie) back into the coffers.

 When we returned to the upper air with the filled canisters, it was hard to accept the fact that this was really Pop’s store—that that was the coffee grinder over there, and the meat slicer, and the rolls of oilcloth on the rack, and Pop’s old roll-top desk in the little cubby-hole office at the back.

 Whenever I was asked to measure out some tiny scoopfuls of “Mrs. Somebody’s Mix” I was reminded of another world that began somewhere under the floor and opened into foreign lands. 

Now that I think of it, Dad took me into a magical cellar beneath the place where he worked as well. A different kind of magic, but one that invited me into foreign lands too. I’ll save that for next time.