The Coming Of Tea And Coffee
by
When the first settlers came to this country, tea and coffee were unknown to them. The favorite drink of that time was a kind of weak beer, which was usually made at home. The first settlers in America could not buy drinks such as they had had in England, and in a new country they often could not make them. So they found out ways of making other drinks in place of them. What we call root beer and birch beer, and a drink flavored with the chips of the hickory tree, were made in New England. Farther south the people made a kind of drink by mixing water and molasses together, and putting in Indian corn.
Such drinks were taken at meals as we take tea and coffee. People also drank a great deal of cider. As the cows hardly ever gave any milk in winter, children were given cider and water to drink. But about fifty years after the time that the first settlers came to this country, people in England began to get tea and coffee. Tea and coffee were soon after brought into this country. At first they were thought to be medicines good for many diseases. Little books were written to tell how many diseases these new drinks would cure. Root beer and birch beer, and tea and coffee, were good things in one way. After they came into use, people did not care so much for stronger drinks.
When tea first came, it was very fashionable. It was called the new China drink. Along with the tea, people brought from China little teacups to drink it from. Most of the cups before this time had been made of pewter. The new cups and saucers were called chinaware. They also brought from China pretty little tables on which they set the teacups when they drank the tea.
When people first got tea in country places, they did not know how to use it. There was a minister in Connecticut who bought two pounds of tea in New York. He took it home with him, and put it away to use when anybody in his house should be ill. He wanted the tea for medicine. His daughters had heard about the fine ladies in town who took tea. They were curious to taste it, and were not willing to wait until they should be ill. So one afternoon, without letting their father know it, they asked two young men who were friends of theirs to the house. Then they got out the package of tea, intending to treat themselves and the young men to a new pleasure. They knew nothing about making tea. When they had boiled it a long time, they poured off the tea and threw it away. They put the tea leaves on a dish, and tried to eat them as one would eat spinach. This is the way they punished themselves for disobeying their father.
Before the Revolution, when gentlemen called at fine houses in the afternoon, the ladies always gave them tea to drink. As soon as a gentleman’s little cup was empty, one of the ladies would fill it up again, and it was not polite to refuse to drink all the tea that was offered. A French prince who was in Philadelphia during the Revolution drank twelve little cups of tea one afternoon. The ladies kept giving him more, and the poor prince did not know how to stop them until another French gentleman told him privately that if he would lay his teaspoon across the top of the cup no more tea would be poured in. He put the teaspoon across the teacup as a sign that he did not wish to drink any more.
Long after tea and coffee were in use in this country they were not known in the backwoods. The people on the frontier drank tea made from the root of the sassafras tree or from the leaves of some wild vines. The whole work of preparing food was done at home. When they wanted to grind meal, they did it by pounding corn in a hole cut in the stump of a tree. They used a large stone pounder which was tied by a rope to a limb of a tree above. After each blow the limb would spring back and raise the pounder. Their corn meal was sifted through a sieve made of deerskin with little holes punched through it. They had to make their shoes and hats and caps themselves, and to weave their cloth at home.