Category History

The most featured Tibetan food is buttered tea, tsampa and meat. The local food and cuisine in Tibet reflect its climate and customs. Due to the extremely high altitudes, and harsh climate, few crops grow at the high altitudes that characterize Tibet, although a few areas in Tibet are low enough to grow such crops as rice, oranges, bananas, and lemon. The most important crop is barley. Vegetables are scarce in the high altitude.

To create Tsampa, Tibetans put some ghee (yak butter) in a bowl, pour some boiled water or tea into the bowl, add some roasted barley flour into the water or tea, mix and then knead the mixture into dough balls and eat them.

Buttered tea is the favorite drink of Tibetan people and usually drank while eating Tsampa. It is made of boiled brick tea and ghee. Ghee, which looks like butter, is a kind of dairy product of fat abstracted from cow milk or sheep milk. Tibetan people like the ghee made of yak milk. When they make buttered tea, they mix boiled brick tea and ghee in a special can, add some salt, pour the mixed liquid into a pottery or metal teapot and finally heat up it (but not boil it). 

 

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Over the years, tea in Russia has grown into something bigger than a simple beverage, and an invitation to tea is considered a sign of fondness and hospitality.

In Russia, the samovar is seen as a symbol of a warm home and family ties as well as something that is truly Russian and owned by the nation.

A notable feature of Russian tea culture is the two-step brewing process. First, tea concentrate called zavarka is prepared: a quantity of dry tea sufficient for several persons is brewed in a small teapot. Then, each person pours some quantity of this concentrate into the cup and mixes it with hot water; thus, one can make one’s tea as strong as one wants, according to one’s taste. Sugar, lemon, honey or jam can then be added freely.

 

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Darjeeling tea is a tea grown in the Darjeeling district, Kalimpong District in West Bengal, India, and widely exported and known. It is processed as black, green, white and oolong tea. When properly brewed, it yields a thin-bodied, light-coloured infusion with a floral aroma. The flavour can include a tinge of astringent tannic characteristics and a musky spiciness sometimes described as “muscatel”.

Tea planting in the Indian district of Darjeeling began in 1841 by Archibald Campbell, a civil surgeon of the Indian Medical Service. Campbell was transferred as superintendent of Darjeeling in 1839 from Kathmandu, Nepal. In 1841, he brought seeds of the Chinese tea plant (Camellia sinensis) from Kumaun and began to experiment with tea planting in Darjeeling.

The British government also established tea nurseries during that period (1847). Commercial development began during the 1850s. In 1856, the Alubari tea garden was opened by the Kurseong and Darjeeling Tea Company, followed by others.

 

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The history of coffee dates back to the 15th century, and possibly earlier with a number of reports and legends surrounding its first use. The earliest substantiated evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen, spreading soon to Mecca and Cairo. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, as well as Southeast Asia and then to America, despite bans imposed during the 15th century by religious leaders in Mecca and Cairo, and later by the Catholic Church.

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the late 15th century, by Sufi Imam Muhammad Ibn Said Al Dhabhani who is known to have imported goods from Ethiopia to Yemen. Coffee was first exported out of Ethiopia to Yemen by Somali merchants from Berbera and Zeila, which was procured from Harar and the Abyssinian interior.

 

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A rainy day always calls for steaming chai and freshly fried pakoras.

How about some fresh hot tea at the chaiwala around the corner? Travel on the Indian railway and the tea- hawker cries out at every station, offering delicious kulhad chai for a few rupees. The fragrant smell of tea brewing with ginger and cardamom soon percolates the air. Indians seem inseparable from their tea. Surely this obsession is an ancient one?

In fact, tea was practically unknown to Indians until the British came, saw and conquered! Though there was a native Indian variety of tea in Assam, the local Assames people would cook the leaves with garlic and oil and eat it as a vegetable!

BELOVED IN BRITAIN

By the tail-end of the 17th century, the British East India Company had started trading with Cinha, besides expanding their trading operations in India. The Chinese were happy to export gorgeous silk, porcelain china for delicate crockery…and a new type of drink called tea. Tea actually started becoming popular as a medicinal drink – advertised as curing all illnesses under the sun from cold to headache to stomach problems to conjunctivitis (!) – and helping its drinkers reach “an extreme old age”. It soon became the rage all over upper-class Europe and the American colonies, as a way to display wealth and status, as it was very expensive. People had it the Chinese way – lightly brewed in hot water, with nothing added to it. Over time, the British started adding sugar, another luxury imported from the booming sugar plantations of the Americas. Soon, a splash of milk was often added as well.

Throughout the 18th century, tea became the preferred drink of the British people…and still hardly anyone in India had even heard of it!

However, the British East India Company was in trouble. Like the Indians, the Chinese too were only interested in gold and silver was leaving its shores regularly. Something had to be done to convince the Chinese to accept goods rather than money in exchange for their tea. But what?

THE TEA TRIBES OF ASSAM

The British now started offering cheap land in Assam to European planters to grow tea. The first tea plantation was set up in Assam in the 1830s using indentured labour. The European planters preferred Indian “jungly tribes” as workers as they were believe to be the only people hardly enough to put up with the awful working conditions.

There was soon a large influx of tribal adivasis from Jharkhand to Assam. They make up a larger part of the population even today and are sometimes called the tea tribes of Assam. On paper, these people were not slaves, but taken to Assam for three to five years, after which they were meant to be free to return to their homes. In reality, many workers were brought in under false promises, and they would often have to keep working under conditions of near-slavery long after their contracts were over.

CHAI FROM CHINA

Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the Chinese, an idea was waiting to be born. The opium drug, which was grown in India, had started to become popular with the Chinese public. Alarmed at this growing drug menance, the Chinese emperor banned all opium imports. However, the Europeans simply switched to smuggling opium illegally into China, in return for their precious tea cargo. They even fought and defeated the Chinese emperor for the right to selling this harmful drug to the Chinese people. This led to the worst drug addiction problem ever seen in the world where one of every four Chinese men became a hopeless opium addict.

In the 1830s, once the British were masters of large parts of India, they decided to start tea cultivation in India. In fact, they even sent a British spy into the interiors of China to steal the secrets of tea cultivation from them. The spy disguised himself as a Chinese wise-man!

CHAI CONQUERS INDIA

In the early 20th century, the Indian Tea Association wanted to get Indians hooked to tea along with the rest of the world. A massive marketing campaign was launched across the Indian Railways. Giant hoardings were put up to advertise tea, along with recipes. People were hired to make and serve tea at all major stations. British companies like Brooke Bond tried to sell tea by giving away free samples. However, Indians didn’t seem to take to this pale bitter brew…until the Indian tea vendors ignored the recipes of their English instructors and brewed it strongly with lots of milk, sugar and spices like cardamom, to imitate the hot flavoured milk that Indians were used to!

This new hybrid tea, known as “masala chai”, soon became a runaway hit in India. Today, India is one of the largest producers of tea in the world, but more than 70% of it is consumed within the country, and we can confidently call tea the national drink of India. But this has only happened in the last 100 years!

 

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The cowrie — or cowry — shell was one of the most successful and universal forms of currency in the world. In West Africa though, the humble shell worked its way into the cultural fiber, taking on a deeper symbolic and ritualistic meaning that has never been entirely lost.

The attractive white shell has all the characteristics required of money: easy to handle and carry around due to its light weight, non-perishable, good for small and large purchases. Its shape makes it instantly recognizable and difficult to forge. The cowries also have very little variation in size and form, which makes them easy to count.

They were often threaded into bracelets or long strings of forty, or packed into pouches to form greater quantities. For large payments, the shells could be tossed into baskets and weighed to determine their value.

• 40 cowries made 1 string,
• 50 strings made 1 head (2,000 cowries total),
• 10 heads made 1 bag (20,000 cowries total).

 

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