The Brits, their tea, biscuits and cozies!

This week we ran out of the stash of Girl Scout cookies I had squirreled away in the freezer for the past two months.  Each evening I would take out the cookies I bought from students at the Spanish Immersion School and served them with our tea.  Harry and I have our tea ritual after dinner most evenings and that usually includes a biscuit or two.  Tea without a cookie Harry refers to as dry tea.  I refer to it as terrible!  He brought back several packages of Ringtons' Tea when he was home in January, along with some biscuits, the British word for cookies.  We have not as yet run out of tea but the English biscuits are long gone.

The English have the most marvelous collections of biscuits available in all their grocery stores.  English biscuits are different from the majority of American cookies.  They are not as sugary sweet as American cookies, and you can have two or three and not feel guilty.  I recently learned that the Brits are leaning towards the American style of sweet, high-calorie cookies.  Our obesity rates are similar too.



Tea is an afternoon meal and a ritual for the Brits (and that's without even talking about "high tea').  I remember my Mom, a first generation American of British origins, used to stop and have tea everyday when I was growing up at three pm, even when it was 90 degrees outside.  Most Americans, and especially American restaurants, do not know how to make tea other than to drop a bag in tepid water.  We snack all day long any way these days, so we really don't need a teatime as yet another excuse for more food consumption.  


The proper way to make tea would be tedious to most Americans.  Warming the tea pot, waiting for water to hit a rolling boil,  steeeping the tea, cleaning the tea leaves out of the pot; too much effort.  Why bother?  Just plop a tea bag in your cup, use the mircro wave and call it a cuppa like the Brits do.  Americans like their tea iced (referred to by my husband as "cold tea"), herbal, bubbled, and in bags, not steeped and poured from a pot.  Years back I had a craze of making tea cozies for friends and family.  Harry's mom taught me to make them on one of our trips.  At that time I thought my enthusiasm for making tea the British way would catch fire with them as it had for me.  Maybe the recipients at least use the cozies as a talking point.

My favorite English tea, Ringtons, is made in the north of England in the city of Newcastle, a few miles from Harry's little town of Annfield Plain.   The company has been a family business  since 1907.  They nearly went under during the first and second World Wars but somehow managed to hold on and become a company that will now mail tea and biscuits to every corner of the world.  This year they are featuring Diamond Jubilee tea pots, mugs, and tea caddies. The Rington horse-drawn tea cart used to be a common site in the north of England, but the carts became vans which still have a bit of charm.  Harry's mum used to have a visit from the "tea man" every other week. 


Recently, my 13-year-old nephew, Luke, came for dinner, and he drank several cups of piping hot Ringtons tea: must be the genes.  We are down to our last large bag of tea or I would have sent some home with him.  We have no current plans for a trip to England so I will probably have to go to the Ringtons web site and pay the outrageous shipping price to get my fix of English tea and biscuits.  I promised Luke I would make sure to share when the post delivered my order.  Maybe I should make him a tea cozy?