Latest / The History of American Food
152 Early 19th Century Tea - Still Extremely Fashionable
Last show on the substandard mic - but the paper towel as popfilter helped some.
Let's talk tea - what tea were people drinking in the early 19th century? The answer was almost uniformly, "bad tea".
Ignorance lead to people needing sugar in their tea b/c they were drinking the bad stuff. In fact a whole grade of "export quality" tea was invented to fulfill the growing global/European/American demand. Just in this case - "expot quality" mostly meant the dregs. Or the dust anyway.
Understanding that most tea Americans were drinking in this age was somewhere between stale and adulterated, and…
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