Food History: Coffee and Tea
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ธ.ค. 2021
- The history of tea and coffee touches on science, politics, culture, and more. Did you know that coffee doesn't come from beans? Or that the history of tea is directly related to the Opium Wars? Learn all about coffee and tea's fascinating history.
Food History is a show all about... well, the history of food. Join host Justin Dodd as he brings you the stories of how your favorite meals ended up on your plate. Today, we're talking coffee and tea. How did these two simple beverages become two of the most consumed beverages in the world?
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Canadian.. Coffee in the AM, and tea for later in the day 🇨🇦☕🍵
Wrong, maple syrup all day
Also Canadian... No coffee ... Tea? yes please
Took the words right out of my mouth (literally all of the words, I’m Canadian too)
Used to do the same as you. After living in multiple countries and absorbing from the cultures I ended up with tea in the morning, coffee in the afternoon 😄
Sounds perfect 👌
Hi, for a future video, can you perhaps do a history on what foods Europeans ate before 'discovering' the Americas? Ireland is/was famous for potato and that's an American crop. Italians are famous for their tomatoes, and again, it's an American crop. A lot of Asian cuisine are famous for hot chili peppers (like kim chi), again an American crop. What did these (and other countries) eat before coming into contact with the New World?
Well a lot of Italian food descended from the Roman food: the salted pork, the steak, the cheese, lasagna (yes, it existed before tomatoes) the olive oil, the seafood, etc. They were further developed with Genoese and Venetian colonies and conquests to the east, connecting them with Chinese and Middle Eastern spices. The Normans introduced casserole and baccala as well as northern style cheeses and beef. Arabs introduced pasta and rice in the renaissance, and trade with China diversified pasta recipes. This culminated in the ultimate recipe book of medieval Italy, the Libro de arte coquinaria by the cultured Roman chef Maestro Martino da Como
In Europe, cereals have always been the staple. In Ireland, this took the form of flatbread made of wheat or oats. Popular recipes included the butter-infused menedach and the high medieval Frumenty porridge. Of course, the winters were very hard, especially as the Little Ice Age began. Potatoes came in just in time to save European civilization.
In East Asia, varieties of mustard and horseradish were the main spices before chili peppers came around. Fruits like Persimmons and oranges were big favorites. In India, the oldest cities made the same curry, made of ginger, garlic and turmeric, and pepper was the common spice and export. Lemon , orange and mango gave new flavors and refreshment. In Asian-American cooking, chile peppers (hot and sweet) and tomatoes are used as substitutes for vegetables that are only available back home.
@@Tareltonlives Thank you very much for the detailed response! Maybe you should do the video.
@@Tareltonlives Thanks, it's one of those questions I've mulled over but didn't bother researching.
Oddball American here! 10:25AM and I have already enjoyed black tea from Fujian in China and coffee from Sumatra. I have a special fondness for Aged Ripe Pu-erh Tea from the Yunnan Province as well. Fun to watch my American blue-collar coworkers scoff while downing another cup of tragically terrible American drip-brewed cheap coffee. They consider me odd for drinking tea at all. No doubt a holdover from The Boston Tea Party and the American folklore about it. Cheers!
I'm from the UK and I used to drink tea with three sugars, when I'd be offered tea at someone's house and told them this you'd think I'd just asked for their first born son. I usually remind them that rationing finished a long time ago.
This video was so charming and well informed! I loved it, learning the origins of "tea" and "cha" was really fun!
I love coffee, and occasionally drink tea when it's cold outside hehe
Isn't tea and cha the same thing?
American here-I drink coffee for the energy and tea (/tisanes) for the flavor(s). Any sort of tea that's got citrusy and/or spicy notes is a wonderful way to unwind even if there is technically caffeine in it.
the arabic at 9:13 is shown left to right. It should be right to left: شاي
Dang, our mistake. Thanks for pointing it out, we'll be more careful in the future!
It’s actually Farsi so it should be چاى but still right to left
Brazilian living in a part of the country where the best coffee is produced.
So yeah, coffee. Lots and lots of coffee of the best quality.
Things may be very different here, but Tsar's Russia banned import of _yerba mate_ to non-existening-yet Poland in 1900's.
Yep, they were a major coffee importers in Europe.
The biggest _yerba_ importer outside of S. America nowadays is ...Syria and Lebanon
This is an awesome history lesson. Thank you!
I knew a lot of this information before, but there are some really interesting tidbits that I never knew! ❤️
I love the irony of Turkey switching from the 1000 year old coffee tradition to being the biggest tea consumer in the world with the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire.
this is fascinating.
Very Informative and excellent.
1) There is a mention of tea in Indian epics and as Buddhism spread from India and they took with them tea and martial arts from India to China.
2) Kashmir is part of India and not an independent country.
Thanks
I've never liked coffee, I do love tea though.
Milk tea with honey is one of my favourites, i think it goes well with sugar or shortbread cookies.
Not a coffee drinker, but Tea... sooooo gooooooood!!!
Um almost a full year before the Boston Tea Party there was the burning of the Gaspee in Pawtuxet Cove in RI. The Gaspee was a tax ship.
I love Chai tea and your new hair color!!
This is very interesting, I've been weaned off caffeine twice in m life and with no ill effects so far but I'm a sweet tea drinker and soft drink drinker.
I ADORE READING
I usually drink coffee, but when I drink tea I proudly show my Lancastrian working class roots: black, sweet, and thick enough to eat
How do you make it thick? With the sugar?
@@RikDog91 make it really strong
@@garethtudor836 OK, stupid (American) question, but does that mean you're making it with loose leaf tea? I can't imagine dropping 2 or 3 teabags in a cup would make tea even slightly thick, but I've never tried.
@@MentalFloss I’d think the thickness would be in reference to the amount of sugar added? @garethtudor, I’m also curious what the thick means!
@@MentalFloss yep, loose leaf black tea in a good ceramic pot, pop a tea cosy on, and wait (possibly longer than you should).
Pour into a mug (NOT a cup - we be workers) and add sugar.
If the spoon doesn't stand up when you've stirred it, it's not strong enough 😉
Best food subject.
Awesome video You think next time you can do a history of Hot coco/hot chocolate.💜💛
One of my favorite coffee legends was that when an Austrian-Polish alliance (which also contained Germans, Cossacks, Lithuanians, etc) chased off an Ottoman Turkish attack on Vienna in 1693, a Ruthenian named Georg Franz Kolschitzky (who lived in Polish-ruled Ukraine and acted as a government liaison with both the Cossacks and the Habsburg empire) found the Vizier's coffee stash, abandoned in the rout. Kolschitsky, in the legend, promptly started his own coffee house in Vienna, the Hof zur Blauen Flasche. While the coffeehouse is real, as was Koloschitsky, the connection is almost certainly fictional, made in 1783 by the current owner Gottfried Uhlich to give his place more romance.
I live in Rhode Island, USA.
I don't drink either everyday. My dad was born In Puerto Rico and he was a pressed coffee person, then my maternal great- grandmother was Irish so we would make small pots of loose tea which I really enjoyed.
Caffeine makes me sick so I drink caffeine free tea.
I just bought 5 boxes of tea yesterday.
Hi slight mistakes in you excellent and informative presentation. The map shows Kashmir in blue as independant country when actually it is an Indian state. 2nd you have explored Tea from chinese rumour but forgot to mention that it is actually mentioned in Ramayan --the indian epic which might have been before the chinese encounter with Tea,
Mmmmm flavor water
This should have been the title for this video.
"every strike brings me closer to the next home run" - Babe Ruth 😂😂💕
A thumbs up for the Kermit the Frong meme reference.
Polish word for tea is "herbata". Not from cha or tea but from latin word "herb"
Love the sweater, Justin - very handsome.
Reminds me to get some more coffee
10-4
I drink coffee in the weekend and tea in the weekdays
Chocolate milk for me, please and thank you 👍
Colonists in Greenwich, NJ, raided the ships and burned the tea.
Coffee is tea
tea for me is best...but with some milk. I do no drink coffee anymore even if I like the smell of fresh grinded coffee.
Me watching this while drinking a cup of coffee 👁👄👁
The coffee at my work says 100% chemical free.
You forgot to mention purple tea and yellow tea.
What is CD? Doesn't he say discovered in 850 CD?
That was probably "CE," i.e. "common era." It's what we grew up learning as "AD," but I believe many sources (including MF) now prefer BCE/CE.
We call it tay in the south 🤣🤠
I'm female love the background
9:13 guys it's not that hard to find out that Arabic scripts are written from right to left, or just simply copy it from an actual Persian or Arabic text. What you wrote there is "yach" not "chai"
The human rights abuses both connected to the two drinks reminds me that I probably should be paying more for both sourced ethically. That and chocolate.
Ill fully admit, I’m extremely addicted to caffeine. I need it everyday
now do cannabis / hemp
Yeah, I'd like to see this one too. Just to see if they get the story straight or a watered down cannabis is bad.
what ever happened to Jonathon?
Do you read the referenced articles or just trust your writers to make you sound informed?
lol a lesson in tea from a guy who calls masala chai, "chai tea".
That was meant to be a joke. In the section from 8:15-9:30 we discuss the etymology of tea/cha/chai, and mention that "chai tea" is a redundant phrase referring (basically) to masala chai.
Needed the caffeine to get through this...
Take this, change it to alcohol and apply it to prehistory. You're welcome, fellow historians.
Chinese king inventing Tea come on who are u fooling we know how China works it would be some chef in his kingdon, What was he even boiling water for to take a bath 😂
The colonizers had their own ships, why didn’t they have enough forethought to go get their own goods from China, India, Africa, and South America? The idiocy.
when does a dish stop becoming the food of immigrants, and start becoming a national dish?
Benjamin Carp is a plagiarizer. That book is ripped off an earlier text, which he cites extensively.
Although caffeine is 'technically' a drug, I find the title of the video misleading and unnecessarily alarmist. The people in China wasted and zombied out on opium were 'drugged'. Coffee and tea are mild stimulants. Nobody is 'drugged' by them.
DRUG - noun "a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body" - Opium, caffeine, aspirin... - all are 'actually' drugs
I consider it more of a direct challenge to the negative connotations of the word "drugged" itself. Anyone who has ever been on psychiatric medication can tell you the wonders that being "drugged" has performed for them, but even carefully prescribed and measured medication is stigmatized. But most people have consumed caffeine, even people who smack-talk psych meds. Pointing out that their morning coffee is just as much of a drug as my morning Adderall is a good point to make IMHO.
@@erraticonteuse Thanks, we were partially thinking along these lines (and, of course, trying to be a *bit* provocative). But without being alarmist (I happily consume coffee daily), we did want to point out that these quotidian beverages *are* affecting our brain chemistry. Michal Pollan's work was definitely influential here-even if people aren't in a drugged stupor, as Honodle points out, I do think it's valid (and hopefully interesting) to consider that billions of us are often experiencing life mediated through a psychoactive substance. (Possibly through several such substances, if we consider the affect sugar et al has on mood/energy levels/etc.) I think it's fair to assume that these two beverages wouldn't have inspired the same kind of (sometimes pernicious) geopolitical maneuverings if they were only consumed for the taste, so it felt like a fair (if, admittedly, *slightly* sensationalist ) framing.
@@MentalFloss In this context, to be considered a drug, a substance needs two attributes:
Tolerance - You need ever greater quantities to achieve the same effect.
Withdrawal - Negative effects of quitting suddenly.
Since coffee & tea demonstrate both effects, calling them drugs was the right choice.
Also, the traditional way to brew coffee is a lot different from the coffee pots in modern times. In Arab countries, coffee is still brewed the traditional way, which is to have a small pot large enough for one cup of coffee, and brew the coffee grounds directly in the pot, along with spices such as cardamom and saffron. The coffee is then poured into a cup, being careful to limit the amount of grounds and spices going into the cup. This doesn't mean that the grounds and spices don't end up in the cup, because it does. Make sure not to drink the last sip, as it will be full of grounds and spices. Other than that, the Arab countries make an interestingly delicious cup of coffee!
However, if your faith prohibits the next part, as mine does, avoid the fortune-telling that sometimes accompanies the coffee. Other than those last two things, enjoy your Arabian coffee!