A Unique gift idea to give to any Tea lover or any British friend, either those still across the pond ,or those now living in Canada or the US, handmade in Canada by British expat now residing in St Niagara Ontario . 
Bridge the miles with a sentimental reminder of home. Give an unusual gift for a change Pages from the Heart are all made by hand from real books otherwise destined for the recycling plant , they were rescued and given a new lease of life as this beautiful handmade eco-friendly gift. A gift of poetry and images ,displayed on the pages of an old book ,by talented artisans.
Pages from the heart can commemorate any occasion ,Or perhaps even better ,can be given for no real occasion at all .Just merely to let a loved one know just how special they are to you.
Visit pages from the heart gallery to check out our collection of tea themed gift books , this is one of my favorite design lines so it is one that I am constantly adding to. preview our range of “Tea” designs throughout this brief history of the origins of the famous British “cuppa”
Growing up in Manchester England the coffee maker was an alien item, until we moved to Canada I”d only known one person that owned one and she was known for her pretentious ways.
Britain, and particularly England, is strongly associated with tea, and of course fish and chips. A cup of tea is a time honored British tradition, and most people cannot think of Britain without thinking of tea.
Tea is thought of as being quintessentially British , and we Brits certainly have consumed copious quantities of the celebrated liquid for over 350 years. but truth be told the origins of the humble British cuppa lie else where and are really, much older than a mere 350 years
The commonly accepted story of the origins of the first cup of tea begins in China, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was relaxing beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a well known herbalist of the period, decided to try the brew that his servant had inadvertently created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now know as tea.
Tea drinking remained a Chinese and then a Japanese custom for many centuries, the drinking of tea becoming formal and even ritualized, particularly in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is impossible to say whether this quaint story is more fact or fiction, but tea drinking certainly became established in China many centuries before it was even heard of in the west. Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating back as far as the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) but it was not until later between 618-906 AD under the Tang dynasty, that tea became firmly established as the national drink of China. It was shortly after this that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had been traveling in China to study. Tea drinking has become a vital part of Japanese culture, as seen in the development of the famed Japanese Tea Ceremony.
So at this stage in the history of tea, Europe was lagging rather far behind . It is only in the latter half of the sixteenth century that we first start to hear brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. These heralded mainly from Portuguese importers who had been living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although some of these individuals may have brought back samples of tea to their native country, it was not the Portuguese who were the first to ship back large quantities of tea as a commercial import. This was done by the Dutch, in 1606 the first consignment of tea was shipped from China to Holland. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink only consumed by the rich upper classes.
Britain, historically renown for its reticence in adopting continental trends , had yet to become the nation of tea drinkers that it is famed for being today. According to the UK Tea council “the first dated reference to tea in Britain is from an advert in a London newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, from September 1658. It announced that ‘China Drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee’ was on sale at a coffee house in Sweeting’s Rents in the City. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and the terms of this advert suggest that tea was still somewhat unfamiliar to most readers, so it is fair to assume that the drink was still something of a curiosity.”
It was the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza that proved to be the pivotal point in the history of tea in Britain. She was a Portuguese princess, and ardent tea drinker, and it was her love of the brew that established tea as a fashionable beverage first at court, and then among the wealthy upper classes. Capitalizing on this new fashion, the East India Company began to import tea into Britain, its first order being placed in “1664 – for 100lbs of China tea to be shipped from Java”
The British took to tea like ducks take to water an enthusiasm that still continues today. . Tea at this stage was still a luxury belonging to the upper-classes as yet tea was still too expensive to be available to the working classes. In part, its high price was due to huge taxes levied on it by the government of the day.
One unforeseen consequence of such high rates of taxation was the spread and growth of ingenious methods to tax avoidance – smuggling and dilution . By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, their enthusiasm for the drink was soon matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it into the country. The smugglers often used murderous and brutal methods but were still supported by tea drinkers all over Britain, who would not have otherwise have afforded their favorite brew. What started as a small time illegal trade, by the end of the eighteenth century had developed into an astonishingly well organized crime network, Worse than the taxation perhaps for the tea drinkers themselves was the dilution of the tea the exorbitant tax rate encouraged ,particularly the smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to the tea leaves. Sometimes the resulting colour was not convincing enough, so anything from sheep’s dung to poisonous copper carbonate was added to make it look more like tea.
By 1784, the government realized that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth. The new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, slashed the tax from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight.
Nowadays tea is thought synonymous with being British, taking time for a cup of tea is considered by many to be a moment of calm dignified enjoyment seized from our hectic lifestyles. It seems a little incongruous to recall that only just over 250 years ago, tea was such a hot political issue in America that it led to an event that changed history forever. This was the infamous Boston Tea Party, a protest against tea duties, in December 1773 that sparked off the American War of Independence and so eventually led to the United States of America becoming an independent nation instead of a group of British colonies, more details of this can be found here
The first tea shipment to arrive in Canada was imported by the Hudson Bay Company in 1716 and it took more than a year to arrive.
As well as influencing foreign nations and indirectly bringing about war, tea was also thought to have improved the health of British workers in the nineteenth century. To make tea water had to be boiled, which prevented water borne disease. Some historians have suggested that the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution was given extra momentum by workers remaining healthy due to their tea drinking.
the Duchess of Bedford (1788-1861) invented the practice of afternoon tea , she felt it too long a period to go without sustenance from mid morning to early evening she experienced a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoon. , she invited friends to join her for an additional afternoon meal at 3 o’clock in her rooms at Belvoir Castle her summer retreat. The menu consisted of small cakes, bread and butter sandwiches, assorted sweets, and, of course, tea. This summer practice proved so popular, the Duchess continued it when she returned to London, sending cards to her friends asking them to join her for “afternoon tea” The practice of inviting friends to come for tea in the afternoon was quickly adopted by other society hostesses. A common pattern soon merged. The first pot of tea was made in the kitchen and carried to the lady of the house who waited with her invited guests, surrounded by fine porcelain from China. The first pot was warmed by the hostess from a second pot (usually silver) that was kept heated over a small flame. Food and tea was then passed among the guests, the main purpose of the visiting being conversation.
The American writer Henry James loved this ceremony, and said at the beginning of his novel The Portrait of a Lady that there were few times more pleasant than those “dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
In more recent years Britain as a whole ,has taken on a less formal aspect , and tea drinking has been a barometer of that change, tea drinking habits have become correspondingly more relaxed. Nevertheless there is a level of formality that still remains. On my last visit back to England I sort shelter from the rain one afternoon in a tea shop in a large branch of Boots. There were some Canadians present in the shop at the time who seemed somewhat surprised by the china cups and teapots being used. “Well this is England madam” the waitress remarked. Perhaps that was a bit naughty, but it does indicate the moderately formal tea ceremony Britain still goes in for.
Britain traditionally has been looked upon as a formal country, but as with most things in Britain extremes are avoided. The British tea ceremony is not as formal as some, but remains more formal than others. In Britain there is nothing that even comes close to the Japanese tea ceremony, but on the other hand you don’t naturally think of Americans, or Australians drinking their tea from china tea sets, this is the first mental association most peoples minds leap to when I tell them I am English .Tea had a symbolic significance when American patriots dumped crates of it into Boston harbor as a protest over taxation by Britain in 1773: America wanted to be free, and in a strangely fitting kind of way the Boston rebels destroyed a symbol of British formality. Between Japan on the one hand, and somewhere like the United States on the other, tea drinking in Britain sits half way along the spectrum of ritual.I often wonder how Britain takes to such tea fads and trends such as Blooming tea or Bubble tea I wonder if these new fads are served in the quaint old English tea shops along side Cornish cream teas and the Darjeeling as beautiful as blooming teas may be and as different as bubble tea is I cannot summon a mental image of the queen partaking of either somehow
For years over billions of hot steaming cups of tea the British have argued whether it is correct practice to add the milk to the cup before or after the hot tea, some maintain that people who add the milk to the cup after the hot liquid are putting on upper class airs and graces in other words being obnoxiously pretentious. Others claim adding the milk to the cup first improves the taste of the tea. But if the truth be told no one really knows for certain from where this differnce in opinion arose, it simply is, but certainly in most renditions has some form of “class” element associated with it. one explanation of the class bias has its roots in economics rather than taste ,the addition of the very hot liquid straight in to the delicate china cups in which tea was first served sometimes resulted in shattered china ,not as readily able to replace the broken vessels as the wealthy upper classes the less affluent lower classes adopted the practice of adding the milk to the cup first to protect their fine china cups.
Milk in tea has over the years become ingrained in the British palate to the point where it is brought to the table every time tea is served. But according to some , the tea should be the the first and only thing in a teacup if you prepare the tea correctly, nothing more needs to be added. Milk only dilutes and changes the wonderfully sophisticated, full flavor that tea provides another class divide, in times past The long journey from the Orient made tea prohibitively expensive. Milk, on the other hand, was cheap and became the condiment of choice among the lower classes. The amount of milk added became a telltale of one’s social standing. The wealthy took their tea undiluted. The middle class poured the expensive tea and then diluted it with milk. The lower class filled the cup with cheap milk and then added a splash of the costly tea.
Amazingly, we drink virtually the same tea today that Emperor Shen Nung drank the day he discovered it. Americans drink 140 million cups of tea each day and 80% of that is in the form of iced tea.
A tea plantation owner introduced iced tea to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. It was an extremely warm day and his hot tea booth was being passed up by the crowds in favor of cold drinks. As desperate measure, since he was out time and money for even coming to the Fair, he added ice to the vats of liquid hot tea and in the process made it one of the highlights of the 1904 World’s Fair.
The tea bag came along as a surprise. Samples of tea at the turn of the twentieth century were given out in small silk bags and instead of opening the bags, the tea bag in its entirety was being dropped into hot water by consumers. Quickly, a tea company sprang into action and patented the tea bag. Thomas J. Lipton was responsible for designing a four-sided tea he dubbed the ‘flo-thru’ tea bag, which allowed tea to steep more quickly in the cup than the customary two-sided bag.
No matter how we take our tea hot or cold , with or without milk and sugar ,made from loose tea leaves steeped in a silver pot and poured into fine bone china cups or made in a mug with a teabag who cares so long as no one deprives me of it ,tea is one of the simple pleasures in life that has survived for thosands of years and will probaly carry on for thousands more.
