On 2/22/2005 3:59 AM, Bluesea wrote:
> "Serendip" > wrote in message
> ...
>>
>> Vietnam War, but I don't think that's what you meant. My grandmother was
>> only "thrifty" when it came to teabags - she just didn't think that a
>> teabag was "done" as long as there was any coloring power left in it.
>
> Do you happen to know why/how she developed such a belief? I'm so
> flavor-oriented, and so is everyone else I've run across, that I can't
> comprehend the concept. Even in England, way back when, poor people would
> use a lot of milk to save on the expense of tea but I never got the
> impression that they reused tea over and over again. In China, though,
> sometimes it got to the point where a poor family could only offer hot water
> as "tea" to a guest.

Nope, not a clue... so I called my mother.

Once she stopped laughing, realizing I wasn't asking her for the little
glass jar, she said, "don't you remember what Grandma did with tea?"

Well, of course I did! She would add a little bit of honey for me, and
then pour the tea back and forth from one cup to another, until the
temperature was just right. Heaven forbid I do something like *wait* for
the tea to cool down! I was always transfixed by the jumping tea - she
never lost a drop.

So Mom said, "yes, but do you remember what she did before that?"

Not a clue. So she told me the story.

My grandfather always had severe GI issues, and could not tolerate
caffeine. They had always had Sanka for coffee, but they couldn't find
decaffeinated tea. The doctor suggested she make very strong tea, dump
it out, and then use that teabag in new water - it would remove the
caffeine. Whether it's true or not I don't know, but that's what she was
told. She was concerned she'd forget to look at the clock, and it
wouldn't be the same each time. So, she'd boil water, put a teabag in a
cup, add the water. Empty the kettle, put up new water to boil. Once
that boiled, she'd take out the teabag from the cup, dump the tea, wash
the cup, and make a new cup of tea. Each and every time.

By her reasoning, if the second cup was "better" for you than the first,
then the 3rd, 6th, 8th, had to have been even better. (How I wish I
could ask her if she knew about homeopathy and tinctures!)

She wasn't thrifty, simply misguided.

Needless to say, I will now embrace resteeping, and probably get a bit
teary-eyed each time.