Mae's Real Stories

I was reading a book about tea, and thinking about how my family drank tea. My mother and father drank coffee every morning for breakfast, but sometimes in the afternoon or after dinner, they drank tea.

My mother had a little teapot and a tea ball, which is a round metal ball with holes in it and a lid that screws on. She would put some tea leaves in the tea ball, and put it into a teapot sort of like the one in the picture. Then she put boiling water in the teapot and let the tea leaves soak for quite a while. This made VERY strong tea. She poured a little of this strong tea into a cup and then filled it up with hot water. Children could only have a tiny bit of the tea and a lot of water. Grownups could have it as strong as they liked.

My father drank the tea with a lump of sugar. But he didn't put the sugar into the tea cup. He held it between his teeth, and a little of the sugar dissolved into his tea. He said he did this because that was how they had done it in Russia when he lived there when he was a little boy. That was 100 years ago, but I think they might still do that in Russia. They sometimes put jam into their tea, and sometimes drink it from a glass instead of from a cup, but my father didn't do those things.