by Tim HaywardMy first memory of ‘eating out’ was of tea. I attended a Prep School with pretensions, one of which was classes on a Saturday morning. My Father, who’d attended the same baleful dump with rather more relish, would pick me up at lunch time and, as a treat, take me to the Docks to drink tea and watch the sand dredgers at work. There was a stall built into a railway arch that served the traditional array of artery cloggers and ‘made’ tea. As recommended by Soyer, Beeton and the British Army Catering Corps Field Manual, milk and sugar were already added and the whole kept piping hot all day. (God, I hope it was just the one day.) The dockers had it in what appeared to be huge old jam jars. There was a selection of mismatched mugs for visiting gentry, but I’m sure the proprietor thought ‘the cup’ was an annual football match.
I can still see the deep oxblood red colour, taste the mysterious milk that came in crown-top bottles and feel the way the tannin made your teeth squeak and your tongue roll up. I’d still take a jam jar full of that in place of any perfectly brewed single-estate tea with honeyed champagne notes and a light smokey nose.
Above all, though, I remember the pot. It was made of aluminium and had two handles, one in the regular place and another riveted above the spout. This was so the retired stevedore who ran the place could lift it off the gas ring and pour with it. He was a gigantic man, but then the great Valhallan pot was big enough to have contained a coiled child.
Somebody suggested the other day that I could make excellent tea with good loose leaves and a Bodum cafetiere. It was a brilliant idea. No bags, no strainers, no fiddling around with warming the pot and stirring thirteen times clockwise, just a few spoonfuls of top-notch Darjeeling and a leisurely push on the piston. It was a heartbreaking experience. The liquid that flowed into my cup was perfect in flavour and presentation and utterly without emotional or cultural resonance.
This is a problem. Tea is emotional and cultural resonance -- in a convenient liquid serving. There have been many attempts to imbue it with the baggage of connoisseurship. Yet, no matter how carefully you cup, swill, nose, honk and spit, when it finally comes down to it nothing is as moving as a hungover cup of ‘builder’s’ in a greasy spoon when you haven’t been back to your own to bed; the cup that comforts after an emotional upheaval; the cup that makes up after a ferocious row or the tiny bone china cup with your Grandma.
The British rituals of tea might not match the Japanese for calm elegance and poise, but the ingredients, the process and the equipment are just as burdened with solemn significance. The vessel from whence the cuppa is poured is the key object in the British kitchen. Once the right pot is found it should be protected more jealously than your honour. A 'good pourer' with a properly built up lining of tannin and a spout that doesn't drip is a jewel of great price. If it comes with a cosy knitted by an elderly relative then you are thrice blessed.
For many people, the ‘proper’ teapot is the Brown Betty. It is the teapot a child would draw, the ur-teapot, the sixth Platonic solid. A slipcast, red-ware beauty with a Rockingham glaze, made in the same Staffordshire factories since the days when Victoria had an Empire not a Secret. It crops up in bad war films more often than Alfie Bass, wielded by a brisk, competent WRVS volunteer, dispensing the original tea and sympathy to blitzed families and shell-shocked pilots. It appears in any café scene that needs to express higher social cachet than the urn.
Others favour the straight-sided enamelled pot, often equipped with that extra handle at the front for leverage when pouring tea in institutional quantities. You sometimes come across these beasts in antique shops and, though they look undeniably fetching in a kind of road-mender/tinker/bargee way I can’t love anything which so resolutely refuses to patinate.
My perfect pot is the Picquot Ware T6. My Mother had the first one as a wedding present at the beginning of the sixties. Hers is still going, though knackered. Mine was won at great personal cost in an extended negotiation with a man in Brick Lane Market and comes with the matching tray, milk jug, coffee pot and sugar bowl that my ancestors could probably not afford.
The pots are milled and machined, from a single casting, to such fine tolerances that they can be inverted without leaking. They were built by Burrage and Boyd: a Northampton aluminium foundry that had been making ‘non-electric vacuum cleaners’ throughout the thirties. They had the same, massive, over engineered quality of most British goods of the time, but with the added appeal of irony-free Deco streamlining. Manufacture of the pots was suspended during the war while the company turned out vital military materiel. That little detail adds the extra spoonful to the myth of my pot. It feels like pouring your tea from a bit of a Spitfire.
The T6 is made of ‘Magnailium’ an aluminium/magnesium alloy on which “a ‘silver like’ look could be obtained after polishing”. There’s something lovely about the pretension in that; the idea of buying something knowing that its very construction means an effort to maintain it. That implies either aspirations to gentility (right up there with polishing the front step and blackleading the grate) or servants.
I’m a devotee of the tannin deposits in a teapot. Flavour and, damn it, character, are built up in that tarry coat. On the other hand, the knowledge that the outside of my T6 need not look like a slowly oxidising galvanised bucket was a spectacular revelation. Within minutes of finding that last little detail on their website, I was in the kitchen plying the ‘Duraglit’ with such frenzy that a couple passing in the street stopped and watched me through the window. Granted, I must have looked like I was encouraging a genie to appear but the humiliation meant nothing to me as, with a final flourish of the glass cloth, I revealed the satin lustre of my restored pot.
If you ever ask a man about his watch or his car he’ll give you a wonderful line about how it expresses his character. I could never allow myself to be expressed as a vulgar red car or an enormous chunky diving watch. I am, I discover as I pour from my lustrous T6, a little teapot.
Tim Hayward is a freelance writer living in London, and former host of the UK forum. He publishes the newsletter Fire & Knives. Photo by the author.
