Audience participation #2: the tea edition.

[mrissa]

At dinner the other night, we started trying to figure out what kinds of teas the different Dragaeran houses would have. An entire array of white teas selected for specific occasions for the Issola, for example. Red Rose brewed with extra bags for the Dzur. An Oolong with some orange peel for the Tiassa. Maybe a barley tea for the Teckla, and those flower teas that have to be preserved just right so that they unfold into a flower structure for the Vallista.

Your turn: Dragaeran houses, or Barrayaran Vor families, or any other themed tea things you'd like.

I'd have totally gotten into BPAL if it had offered me an array of tisanes themed around fictional musicians, for example. So...if it had been something else completely, basically.

Comments

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I'm embarrassed to say I read this stuff so far back I can't remember them well enough, but in general I'm rooting for an earthy and rich Puerh to show up somewhere.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'd have totally gotten into BPAL if it had offered me an array of tisanes themed around fictional musicians, This is a fabulous idea for a company, btw.

I always think about very prosaic teas: like what kind of tea would Mr. Tumnus have served? Would it have been full strength or quality, or are we supposed to see the winter years in Narnia as being something like the war years in Britain? Would it have been a higher quality because his position as a spy? Or spiked to make Lucy fall asleep? How did the tea differ at the Beavers? Etc.

I think tea and related ceremonies seems very appropriate for the Cetagandians. (This is the civilization where the women control the gene pool, yes?) But I wouldn't be able to begin to tell you how.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

I'm almost certain Mrs. Beaver would've served tea made from some sort of bark and maybe juniper berries.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or like my Inuit cloudberry tisane, adjusted for region.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I expect full strength but lower quality, and very sweetened and milky, and no lemon to squeeze in as he'd like, oh dear oh dear daughter of Eve.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The Teckla definitely have that barley tea that you have if you're too poor to have actual tea, except that occasionally people who are able to buy real tea develop a taste for it, and then sneak into restaurants that serve it and tell all their friends, such good food, a shame about the tea.

Dragons have that tea that China used to export to Russia-- this is a story I learned in college when I was writing an essay on the history of tea-- so when you're exporting tea, you can send it as bags of dried leaves, or you can grind it to powder, but both of those forms are liable to some kinds of travel difficulty. So the Chinese in the sixteenth century or so used to grind it to powder and then bind the powder into cakes with some kind of binding agent, and then you had these huge bricks of tea which you had to actually shave bits off with a knife and melt to make your tea, and you could just stack them on a cart. And they started by using rice flour as a binding agent, but that added the cost of the rice to the cost of the tea. So they started using yak blood, which was very cheap, and they sent these huge cakes of yak blood tea to Tibet and Russia and Azerbaijan and so on.

Only the Tibetans were, as they still are, Buddhists, and therefore vegetarians at least sometimes, and they protested. So the Chinese switched to using rice flour... and then the Russians sent an emissary asking what they had done to the tea and could they kindly put it back the way they it had been immediately. There is a Chinese literary epithet for Russian meaning 'those people who voluntarily drink yak blood tea', with a connotation of 'good god'.

The Dragons totally sent that emissary.

The Phoenix smiles serenely and drinks her tea with rice flour.

Jhereg drink coffee. I think that's canonical.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Klava isn't coffee. It's the way coffee smells.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Which I envy.

Existentially, though, I think it fills the position of coffee rather than tea.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We had been assigning klava to the Easterners, not the Jhereg. Possibly wrongly.

[writegirl23.livejournal.com]

I could see all the Old Vor sticking to strong black tea, possibly made out of some Barrayaran plant which tasted bitter and not all that good, but no one would admit it. And Cordelia and Lady Alys start a trend with Betan green tea, or something like that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. "This is made from nettles!" "Your grandfather drank those nettles every morning of his life!"

[careswen.livejournal.com]

In undergrad, my gaggle of girls brainstormed this list of what kind of coffee/tea each religion was. Like Catholicism was espresso, Paganism was decaf herbal tea, Hinduism was chai, etc. I can't remember how the rest of it went, but I assure you that it was terribly clever (or at least seemed so at the time). The fact that it was probably in the middle of a studying all-nighter only serves to prove my assertion.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Jen The World's Best Lab Partner and I used to sing a completely inappropriate song for our friendship, because it was explicitly a song for lovers, but it had, "You drink your coffee with sugar and cream, I'll drink my decaf herbal tea," and that was her and me every morning in the physics office, and then it went on to talk about Henry Miller and Anais Nin, and I had been reading Anais Nin that semester and read her some at one of our coffeehouse reading chats.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I remember that song! That's probably where I got the phrase.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

And Discordians drink bubble tea?

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Heh!