Several years ago, I decided to quit drinking coffee. As I traveled a lot, I found it incredibly tiresome to be so beholden to caffeine each morning. I'd have to plan the start of my day around locating and consuming the drink, lest I suffer the headaches and lethargy of withdrawal. No doubt, some places I traveled had incredible coffee, and it was so pleasurable to kick off the morning with a small cup of espresso or the like. But some places had terrible coffee — the stuff kept warm for hours in a drip coffee carafe that was never that great when freshly brewed.

I switched to drinking tea — caffeinated still, but far less so than the Americanos that I'd previously consumed. I didn't wake up thinking about the caffeine blast that was necessary to launch myself into the day.

But finding a good cup of tea, particularly when one's traveling about the US, is as challenging as finding a good cup of coffee — even more so, arguably, since thanks to the Starbucks-ification of coffee consumption, most folks have a decent idea of what "good" coffee should taste like. And, of course, that green and white maiden is ubiquitous. It's hardly the best coffee, but it's reliably good, as the standardization of chain restaurants demands such things.

There isn't the equivalent of Starbucks for tea drinkers. (And my god, bubble tea does not count here.) At far too many restaurants, you'll still be served with a little carafe of water and a stack of tea bags, as though steeping a Tetley tea bag in warm water will produce anything other than disappointment.

But I'm not sure that I'm that amazing at making my own tea at home. Reading the classic set of instructions penned by George Orwell — "A Nice Cup of Tea" — underscores how poorly. I use tea bags a lot of the time (although once I finish this particularly large box of Twining's Earl Grey, I am going back to loose tea). I don't use a tea pot. As such, I don't warm the pot or even my mug before I infuse the leaves. I don't give it a good stir. I use an electric kettle, and I'm not sure that I always wait for the water to be at a really rapid boil.

To my credit, I don't use sugar. I don't add my milk first — and I use oat milk, which Orwell didn't have to reckon with. I don't reuse my tea bags, something I did for a while until Kin jokingly commented that he earned enough money to use a fresh tea bag each time.

Orwell's essay was written during the post-war rationing, and I wonder if I re-used tea bags because that's how I saw my mother drink her tea: a balled-up tea bag sitting in teaspoon on the counter. Why did she re-use them? Was it a remnant of growing up in post-war Britain? Or was it less about rationing from the war and more about rationing from living in the US, where decent tea bags — in the Seventies, surely — were hard to find. I don't remember her squirreling tea away in her suitcase when we traveled home from a visit to family in the UK. I don't remember her receiving a parcel with tea bags as a gift. So perhaps she had to devise her own rationing system — I don't know.

I vaguely remember instructions from Granny about how to make (and pour) tea properly. But again, I don't recall if she was a milk first person. She certainly allowed us to sweeten our tea. Indeed, tea with milk and sugar, served in a little mug with bunnies on it, was something I was given when, as a child, I was sick with the flu. I think it was the only time I drank out of those cups. I still have the saucer somewhere.

This is the sort of archeology of cooking practices — my own, my family's, my culture's — that I want to write more about here. As we remain holed up in the apartment, thanks to the pandemic, I guess I'll practice getting better at making tea, savoring team, and thinking about why on earth this sort of thing matters so much to me.