Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 April 1896 — THEY PICKLE THEIR TEA. [ARTICLE]

THEY PICKLE THEIR TEA.

The Burmese Make a Preserve of the Wild Tea of Assam. The earliest users of tea in New England, it may be remembered. laid themselves open to ridicule on the part of ill-bred persons. They had some tea, recommended as a fashionable English dish, but they had no directions for using it. After much deliberation they decided that it was ’’greens,” so they boiled it and served it with a sauce, as one serves spinach. They rejiorted that it wasn’t good, and they wondered at the extent to which votaries of fashion would go in pursuit of novelties. The New Englanders, however, were only using their tea as a great part of the people of the East uses its tea. Infusing tea leaves, and drinking the infusion is only one way of "taking tea.” Tea cigarettes offer a second way of doing so. In upper Siam little tea is drunk; most of it is prepared for chewing, and the laboring clast's there use it largely. In Thibet and Western China brick tea is stewed with milk, salt and fat, and is eaten as a vegetable; and in Burtnah they make what Is called pickled tea, which is eaten as a preserve with the other articles of food. The great royal gardens at Kew, England, recently obtained specimens of the plant as grown in Burmah, and in the Kew Bulletin is an Interesting account of the process of picking and the method of using this tea. The tea is called let-pet or leppett tea, and is made from the wild tea of Assam. Camellia theifera. It is grown in the Yauug Baing State of the Northern Shan States, whose “inhabitants, one and all, Including the sawbwa himself, trade in the commodity.” No explanation of the word “sawbwa” is vouchsafed; but from the word “himself,” which followed the mysterious title, it is evident that the sawbwa is akin to the grand panjandrum, who also was known as "himself." The tea gardens of the sawbwa himself and the other inhabitants of this Yaung Baing State are on the hillsides, which are very steep in that. State. The trees yield crops of trees suitable for the market until they reach maturity at a height of some sixty feet, but the best article is obtained from young shrubs, of which the gardens chiefly consist. Two crops of tea are secured each year—one in May and one in July—only the young and tender loaves being taken. The leaves, wlillf* still green, are boiled in large, narrownecked pots made for the purpose. When thoroughly boiled the contents of the pots are turned into pits dug in the ground. These pits are square and about six feet deep. The,sides ami bottom are lined with thin walls of plantain leaves, which keep the tea pure from contact witli the earth. The pit being full of boiled tea and the juices from the pots, a top made of plantain loaves is placed over it, and earth Is •piled above it, big atom's and other heavy weights being finally placed on the top. The tea is thus compressed for some months. When the trading season comes the pits an* opened, and the ten sold to the traders. For transport the tea is packed in long baskets. The baskets have no lid, but are covered in w’lth strips of bamboo, so arranged ns to serve the purpose of a lid in being alrtlglit, and at the same time to admit the insertion of a wedge, the pressure of which prevents fermentation from setting in. Every day the wedges are hammered in a little further, so that, although the tea dries in the baskets and shrinks, a constant, pressure is kept up.