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Everything you wanted to know but didn't dare to ask about this amazing plant

Throughout its long history, tea has been used as a medicine, an aid to meditation, a means of payment, a means of controlling rebels and even as a bribe. The story of tea is a story about humanity, people and the best and worst in them.

Do you know what tea is?

Have you ever wondered, what exactly is tea?

The history of tea goes back to the early Paleolithic, 500,000 years ago. Tea is an evergreen plant, green leaves with white aromatic flowers, golden yellow stamens, botanical name Camelia sinensis. Tea is made from its leaves. Only selected leaflets or buds with leaflets are harvested. Further, the leaves are processed in various ways to obtain white, yellow, green, black or oolong tea. About tea variations a little later. Other names are also known: Thea viridis, Camelia thea, Thea sinensis ... to name just a few. Camelia sinensis can grow up to a tree height of several meters or it can be cultivated as a shrub about 1 m high for easy leaf picking. In the territory of China, you can find trees that are several hundred years old. One of the oldest, allegedly, is 1700 years old. There are two subspecies: sinensis and assamica. Sinensis grows in the territory of China, where it is also its ancestral home, while assamica can be found primarily in the Indian province of Assam (hence its name), but also in: Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and southern China.

Tea as food

Yes, that can be done.

There are records that tea (the leaves of camellia sinensis) before it became a beverage served as food:

Burma-pickled leaves as a salad

Steamed Siamese leaves were eaten with dried fish, lard, garlic, salt and oil.

Kashmir tea leaves were eaten with anise, salt and radicchio

Tibet-leaves were served together with barley, goat's milk butter and salt

Many tea lovers still use tea as food today. Leaves that have already been soaked several times and no longer yield a tasty drink, can be used as a salad with vinegar, a little oil and garlic. Fresh leaves can be used in the same way. Of course, fresh leaves have a stronger taste. Some leaves are lightly fried as an addition to various foods. It is often used with shoyu or tamari sauce. We must not forget about powdered tea: matcha, which can be used to make very tasty desserts. The possibilities are endless.

Čaj koji nije čaj

Što ako listovi nisu camellia sinensis?

Other herbal preparations that are prepared by pouring hot water over other dried leaves, flowers, roots or even bark are actually infusions, or in the vernacular: concoctions. Why then do our people call decoctions-infusions tea? It is to be assumed that someone, once upon a time, broke the pots. He saw the steeping of leaves and heard that it was called tea. The next time he saw the same action, he just didn't know that this time it was other leaves (leaves of another plant: mint, nettle), he remembered the word he heard and thought: look, tea! The name was received and passed down through the generations.

Why do we call it "tea"?

The name tea was established from the Chinese name Ch'a , which in ancient times was the name for very bitter tea, that is, as in the ancient Chinese writing Pen Sao (2500 BC - reign of the so-called Yellow Emperor) mentioned: "Bitter leaf is called ch'a, hsuan and yu...", which is also a confirmation that in the very beginning tea leaves were used very little processed, as a drink that was quite bitter, and only later was the processing method perfected (drying, steaming, frying, rolling...) to make the drink tastier and more drinkable, a real pleasure for the taste buds. Ch'a in Cantonese means tea, the letter "i" added at the end in the original means: tea leaves. But this rule does not apply everywhere. It is common knowledge that the Western European world does not use the word Ch'a or Chai in everyday speech. The English mention tea, the French mention thé, and the Germans Tee, which is the second most common name for tea. One of the theories says that the name comes from the first tea that was imported to Europe by the Dutch East Company at the beginning of the 17th century. It is a tea from a small Japanese island where the local people called it tei - a leaf, which is a bit confusing because in Japan they use cha when talking about tea ( chado-way of tea). In the Netherlands, „thee“ remained customary. Apart from the theory with the Dutch trading company, we must not lose sight of the fact that in some parts of China the word "tea" is pronounced: "Tey", "Ti" and even " >La" (which it hasn't taken root anywhere).