Samovars, Mint Tea and Butter Tea: How Russia, the Middle East, the Himalayas and Malaysia Drink Tea

No two samovars are quite alike. They have been made of silver, red, green and yellow copper, brass, a zinc-copper alloy called tompac, cast iron, steel and even gold, in shapes from eggs and barrels to classical urns and the tall silver steeples of Persia. Used all day, a samovar did not need constant relighting, and it became the place a family gathered. In poor homes, to lose the family samovar was a humiliation.

Russians drink their tea black, through the day, sweetened with honey or sugar and often with jam spooned straight into the mouth between sips. You are “more likely to be invited for a cup of tea than for a meal,” and tea time, with cakes, sandwiches and cookies, can last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Our former intern Olga remembered families gathered around the samovar, and relatives settling down for one last cup at the end of every birthday party.

Our writer Richa Gupta, who interviewed her, was struck by how close this is to India, where tea is drunk “without ceremony or any pomp and show,” a cup every few hours; the difference is that in Russia tea is far more often a social occasion. In an 1860s photograph of St. Petersburg carriers in a public tea room, one man drinks from his saucer, a habit common in Russia for the simple reason that it cools the hot tea quickly.

The aristocracy drank it from the 1640s, but it arrived by a long, tightly controlled caravan route from China, and only became cheap and popular across all classes in the 19th century. Samovars were made in Tula, the town that became the “Detroit of tea kettles,” and Russia’s great writers, from Pushkin to Tolstoy and Chekhov, made the samovar a symbol of Russian life. The smoky blend named for those caravans is in Russian Caravan tea.

Pushkin put it simply: “Ecstasy is a glassful of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth.” Peter Keen, writing for us, argued that the samovar was made to stand for “what makes us Russian” in the 19th century, even before tea had spread across the classes, although the vessel itself probably came from Persia. Today it is often heated electrically, and is losing its central place, much as the old British kettle has.

The samovar traveled south too. It was embedded in the culture of Kashmir, where, by Keen’s account, Hindu samovars were made of brass and Muslim ones of copper; kahwa is traditionally kept hot in one. See Kashmiri kahwa.

Neither country was always a tea country. Coffee came first across much of the Islamic world, and tea spread later, as rulers and religious authorities restricted coffee and alcohol and as trade made tea cheap. Morocco’s supply grew in the 19th century when British merchants, cut off from their Russian market by the Crimean War, shipped green tea there instead; imports grew from 400,000 to 5.5 million pounds in 30 years.

Turkey, a coffee nation for centuries, turned to tea in the 20th century and now grows most of what it drinks. By the figures our blog cited in 2016, Turkey drank the most tea per person in the world, over 3,000 cups a year, with Morocco second. That works out to about eight cups a day in Turkey and five in Morocco.

The kettles are part of the ritual: in Turkey, the lower one boils the water and the upper one holds the tea, in pots traditionally of silver, enamel or aluminum. The tea in both countries is generally a basic grade, crushed into small pieces to make a full-flavored base for mint in Morocco and for sugar in Turkey. Peter Keen called these teas an acquired taste, “well worth trying for their freshness, sweetness” and their difference from an everyday cup.

Iran

Iran’s tea traditions were shaped by Russia, which traded more directly with China. Its own tea is light, and Iranians distinguish purrang, full-colored red tea, from kamrang, tea with little color; most of what they drink is imported. Tea growing itself came to Iran from India: in 1899, by our blog’s account, the prince Kashef al-Saltaneh, a former ambassador to India, brought back 3,000 Assam seedlings in bags protected by his diplomatic immunity.

Recipe: Middle Eastern spiced tea

Across the Middle East, tea is often spiced. This is the version we shared for Eid in 2016.

For a Moroccan-style cup without fresh mint, our Mint Green blends green tea with mint.

Traditional Tibetan butter tea is made of tea, yak butter and salt. The tea maker boils the leaves for several hours, skims the strong brew into a cylinder with fresh yak butter and salt, and shakes it. The tea “ranges in hue from a brownish purple to a fawn color and has the consistency of thick oil.”

Our writer Adeline Teoh first met it at 17, on a trek in Nepal, at a Tibetan Buddhist school on the southern rim of the Kathmandu Valley. After weeks of sweet milk tea, it tasted as if, instead of “milk and two sugars,” someone had added curdled milk and two salts. Butter tea, she came to see, is an acquired taste for outsiders.

Tibetans began drinking Chinese tea in the Tang dynasty (618–907), and it was a staple by the Song dynasty (960–1279). At that altitude few crops will grow, so the diet leaned on meat and dairy, and tea came in by trade. Tibet paid in horses, along a route the Chinese called the “tea horse way”: one historical account records 20,000 horses traded for 15 tons of tea in a single year, and compressed tea bricks served as currency. China ran the trade through a Tea and Horse Office, and goods such as swords were valued in tea bricks.

Peter Keen, writing for us, traced why the trade mattered so much: China could never breed war horses of its own, so for centuries tea was its answer. He estimated the annual trade at 7,500 tons of tea for 10,000 horses, with Buddhist monasteries used as warehouses. Smuggling tea seeds into Tibet, where farmers wanted to grow their own, was punished with three years of hard labor. Tea traveled as bricks until the late 1300s, a form that survives in the pu-erh teas of Yunnan.

The butter is churned from yak milk and fermented; a lump goes into a pot of local black tea that may have boiled for up to half a day, with salt, and the whole is churned to a froth. Families once made huge pots of it and drank it day and night; a modern Thimphu restaurant is more likely to whip it in a kitchen mixer. It arrived looking like “frothy hot chocolate” with a light purple hue, and tasted “more like a gentle broth.”

Our writer Zac O’Yeah drank it at the Red Dragon, a small eatery above the traffic circle on Thimphu’s main street, after a meal of bathup noodle soup, paa (dried meat fried with red chilies) and datshi (spinach in yak cheese gravy). Bhutanese meals have no dessert, so the choice was a Druk beer or butter tea. Traditionally, the fermented butter is matured in sheep-stomach bags wrapped in yak skins. His advice: think of it as a soup, and it goes down well at the end of a meal. The full story of suja is on our blog.

On almost every Malaysian street there is a kopitiam, a coffee shop, serving the national drink, teh tarik, literally “tea pull.” Strong black tea made from tea dust is mixed with evaporated and condensed milk, then poured from one jug to another, from a height, to cool it and build a long-lasting froth. The best pullers compete on height and tricks, and the Malaysian government has declared teh tarik part of the country’s beverage heritage. At home, our writer suggests a strong CTC Assam or an Irish Breakfast blend as the base. Our Irish Breakfast Black works well.

The proportions are the tea maker’s own. The condensed milk is what gives teh tarik its body and long-lasting froth, and its sweetness softens any astringency in the tea, though some drinkers find it too sweet. Competitions now judge both the best-tasting teh tarik and the best performance.

Adeline Teoh’s parents were born in Taiping, in peninsular Malaysia, and she grew up in Sydney; on her first remembered visit to Malaysia, at 12, teh tarik and roti canai were the two things she took home with her. She still does not count a Malaysian restaurant as Malaysian unless teh tarik is on the menu.

Teh tarik’s milk tea cousins

Teh tarik has relatives across Asia, each with its own twist. Our 2017 survey of iced tea traditions found most of them in the same belt, offshoots of China’s tea culture.

• Thai cha yen: Ceylon or Assam tea with sugar and condensed milk and spices such as star anise, tamarind and orange blossom, served over ice; it grew from the tea traditions of Chinese refugees after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
• Taiwanese bubble tea: created in 1988, when Lin Hsiu Hui of the Chun Shui Tang teahouse added tapioca balls from her fen yuan dessert to her tea during a staff meeting.
• Hong Kong pantyhose tea: also called silk stocking tea, strong chilled black tea brewed through a long tea sock and mixed with evaporated or condensed milk; affordable Ceylon black tea is the usual choice, a legacy of British rule.