“It was very expensive and very beautiful, and one of the things that made tea drinking attractive was all the pretty stuff that went with it, like having the latest iPhone.” “Portugal was one of the routes porcelain got to Europe,” Ellis noted. We imported tiny porcelain tea bowls, the saucers, the dishes for sugar, the small teapots.”Ĭatherine’s home country had a hand in in popularising this aspect of the tea experience, too.
No sugar spoons, no cups, no tea kettles (only kitchen kettles), so we did what always happens: we copied the entire ritual from China. As Pettigrew recounted, “Until tea arrived with the Dutch, we didn’t know anything about tea. Of course, the upper class didn’t invent the ritual of tea-drinking themselves – they were imitators too. “When the queen does something, everyone wants to follow suit, so very, very gradually by the end of the 17th Century, the aristocracy had started sipping small amounts of tea,” Pettrigrew said. So tea became associated with elite women’s sociability around the royal court, of which Catherine was the most famous emblem.”Īnd what happens with famous people? Non-famous people imitate them. Indeed it was so pricey (a pound went for as much as a working-class citizen made in a year), that, according to Ellis, “it ruled out anyone but the most elite and wealthiest sectors of society. That last bit probably isn’t true (etymologists believe the word ‘tea’ came from a transliteration of a Chinese character), but what is for sure is that tea was already popular among the aristocracy of Portugal due to the country’s direct trade line to China via its colony in Macau, first settled in the mid-1500s (visit today to sample the other end of this culinary exchange, the Portuguese pastéis de nata, aka egg custard tarts). A fun legend has it that the crates were marked Transporte de Ervas Aromaticas (Transport of Aromatic Herbs) – later abbreviated to T.E.A. When she relocated up north to join King Charles, she is said to have packed loose-leaf tea as part of her personal belongings it would also have likely been part of her dowry.
This hookup made her one very important lady: the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. Travel back in time to 1662, when Catherine of Braganza (daughter of Portugal’s King John IV) won the hand of England’s newly restored monarch, King Charles II, with the help of a very large dowry that included money, spices, treasures and the lucrative ports of Tangiers and Bombay.
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