Not my cup of tea

The right cup of tea can make a morning and a wrong one can spoil it. My morning tea was all messed up by the new tea boy in our office. The concoction was not to my taste though it was served in my cup. So as not to sound harsh, I said “It’s not my cup of tea!” He smiled and brought me the same tea in another cup!!!

In a modern workplace full of mixed tastes and cultures, it is not easy to get your perfect tea at the desired time in the right cup with the accurate mix of milk and sugar, especially with the options of green tea, black tea, Moroccan tea and sulaimani chai.The usual office tea boy in my current place of work is hearing impaired and cannot speak. But frankly he was always able to deliver an acceptable cup of tea only with instructions in sign language!!

When I worked in India, tea times were indeed fun times! The office could not accommodate a pantry, so the easiest and most exciting option was to “order” tea whenever required (or not required), from a road side tea stall. This was an interesting exercise of waving out from the window and showing with your fingers the number of tea cups that were to be delivered! And then after half an hour a small boy with greased clothes would bring an aluminium kettle and a few 'washed' extra small tea cups (with saucers). My cup of tea would be ‘half filled’ with a honey coloured liquid of saturated sugar syrup with minimum tea leaves and too much milk. In spite of a common set of instructions, he could never get it right!

Making the perfect cup of tea is an art indeed. It’s a subtle balance of the right amount of tea leaves, accurate boiling time, precise proportion of milk and sugar and finally the ideal cup. The lesser known secret to a great cup of tea lies in getting the exact temperature for the first sip. And that can only be achieved by the famous south Indian mixing technique of pouring the tea from one cup to the other for about four times, in rhythmic flow,not spilling a single drop!

Even after getting trained for almost seven years from a die-hard Indian foodie husband towards this unique tea making skill, I have never been able to get it right! Well, let’s say, it’s just not my cup of tea!!!