Next to my bed lies George Orwell’s Essays, the brick­like Every­man’s Library edi­tion of the 1984 author’s thoughts on ide­ol­o­gy, colo­nial­ism, the abuse of lan­guage, crime and pun­ish­ment, and just what con­sti­tutes a nice cup of tea. The astute essay­ist keeps his mind pre­pared to go any­where, and Orwell’s rig­or­ous love of sim­ple Eng­lish plea­sures places him espe­cial­ly well to write on the sub­ject of how best to pre­pare a serv­ing of “one of the main stays of civ­i­liza­tion in this coun­try, as well as in Eire, Aus­tralia and New Zealand.” His essay “A Nice Cup of Tea,” which first ran in the Evening Stan­dard of Jan­u­ary 12, 1946, breaks the process down into eleven points, from “One should use Indi­an or Cey­lonese tea” to “One should take the teapot to the ket­tle and not the oth­er way about” to, final­ly, “Tea — unless one is drink­ing it in the Russ­ian style — should be drunk with­out sug­ar.” These guide­lines may sound to us a tad aus­tere at worst, but Orwell presents some of them as down­right “con­tro­ver­sial.” Dare he so bold­ly insist upon drink­ing only out of a “good break­fast cup,” de-cream­ing milk before pour­ing it into tea, and nev­er, ever using strain­ers nor bags?

He does indeed. His­to­ry has remem­bered Orwell as one of author­i­tar­i­an­is­m’s most out­spo­ken ene­mies, but clear­ly he had moments, espe­cial­ly when it came to his bev­er­age of choice, where he him­self would brook no dis­sent. Decades lat­er, a much more easy­go­ing writer would make his own con­tri­bu­tion to the lit­er­a­ture of Eng­lish tea pro­ce­dure: A short piece by Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy author Dou­glas Adams sug­gests that you “go to Marks and Spencer and buy a pack­et of Earl Grey tea” (this may, depend­ing upon your loca­tion, require an over­seas trip), that “the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves,” and that “it’s prob­a­bly best to put some milk into the bot­tom of the cup before you pour in the tea,” since “if you pour milk into a cup of hot tea you will scald the milk.” Though we here at Open Cul­ture have made no secret of our inter­est in cof­fee, how could we turn down a cup of tea made to the stan­dards of such well-respect­ed men of let­ters?

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Gold­en Rules for Mak­ing the Per­fect Cup of Tea (1941)

Epic Tea Time with Alan Rick­man

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.