That romance comes into the cup at home, too. It begins in the process, the ritual and routine of preparing. First, take the opposite experience—making a sweet, milky masala chai with brisk CTC tea from Assam: fussing with the spices to find a balance between the lingering cool of cloves, the peppery bite of ginger, the warmth of cinnamon, and the hot masculinity of cardamom pods crushed like bubble wrap between thumb and forefinger, stirring until tiny bubbles wheel up the sides of the pot, then dashing the tea between a pair of glasses to blend. The bouncy hecticness of the Indian street is present in masala chai.
Darjeeling tea is different. Soft-spoken rather than brash. Simplicity over baroque flamboyance. Contemplative more than energetic, with little sense of urgency or heavy-handedness. The same is true when preparing it. Putting the kettle to boil. Springing the lid open on a tin of Darjeeling tea—that immediate aroma: the grassy floralness of a spring tea, the mellower, spiced notes of an autumn one—and spooning some dry leaves into the pot, or plucking a tea bag from a metal tin whose original logo has begun to flake. Watching as tight bubbles form on the bottom of the kettle and drift unsteadily to the surface, then pouring the hot water over the leaves. The reaction is immediate, the interaction with the leaves. “No other drink is so engaging,” said Steven Smith in Portland about a pinch of second flush Darjeeling leaves beginning to come alive in the cup. The leaves breathe and stretch in the pot as sand streams through the wasp’s waist of an hourglass timer marking the minutes, the muscatel flavors bloom, and the color of the liquor turns to shimmering brass or copper. And then, finally, pouring through the strainer into a favorite teacup to sip.
The personalities of Darjeeling are reflected in each cup. They change from garden to garden, day to day. Sanjay Sharma calls ones from Glenburn “Glenburn in a cup.” The manager of each Darjeeling estate could say the same. A unique set of conditions make it not just a Darjeeling tea but one from a particular garden. Nothing is added, no flavors, no scents, no secrets. Just natural Darjeeling. Uniquely so.
“So many factors to produce an act of nature. You can’t repeat it. It’s like a human face,” Sanjay Kapur said in his Delhi workshop. “That’s what makes the tea so dynamic—and addicting.”
Where will Darjeeling tea be in twenty years? In late autumn, the season nearly finished, Sanjay Sharma stood on a large boulder along the Rangeet River at the bottom edge of Glenburn’s property and looked out over the water that had just begun to run clear in the last few days after unusually late rains. He considered the question, turning around to face a field of young tea shrubs. They had been brought up in the nursery from Glenburn’s own seeds and planted out as saplings only in spring.
“I’m an optimist,” he finally said, looking over the healthy plants. “You have to be. You look at the mud, put a hole in it, plant something …” He let the sentence fade. A tight smile spread slowly across his face as he turned back to the river that he could soon start fishing.
“The level of passion would surprise you,” Anindyo Choudhury said of planters, owners, and managers in Darjeeling. “Despite the hardships they are going through now, they remain passionate.”
The Darjeeling tea industry continues to move ahead, slowly. Healthier soil, new plantings, fine vintages, excellent green and white teas, higher prices, a wider public. Movement, as required, as the twelfth-century Indian saint Basavanna intoned to Shiva a thousand years ago:
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.5
It is moving ahead, though not in step with the highest technology with which India has lately become famous, or chemical-driven concoctions, or genetically modified superstock. But it is staying true to its hands-and-nose approach to making crafted teas using century-old machines and honed skills—new varieties and styles, perhaps, but using ancestral methods passed down from tea planter to tea planter, crafting teas that reflect both a specific place and a specific season one batch at a time in ways nearly unchanged since Darjeeling started making tea. “Darjeeling tea is not an industry,” Rajah Banerjee once said. “It is a handicraft, a very specialized art.”6
Can that handicraft survive? There is no replacement if it does not, no place to outsource its unique flavors, no hills that will yield up such delicate aromas and subtle body. Nowhere else can duplicate its set of contributing influences nor its elusive taste.
Those begin in the steep hills and fertile soil of Darjeeling and grow upward toward the cycling cosmos. Two leaves and a bud at a time.
Recipes
PERFECT CUPS OF TEA
Darjeeling Tea
Masala Chai
Chennai Chai
Tibetan Tea with Salt and Butter
Fresh Passion-Fruit Chai
BEGINNINGS TO A DARJEELING DAY
Aloo Dum
Puri
Masala Omelet
Porridge
TO ACCOMPANY AFTERNOON TEA
The Ritz of London’s Afternoon Tea Scones
Afternoon Tea Pound Cake
Onion Pakoras (Spicy Onion Fritters)
Timeless Cucumber Sandwiches
Glenburn’s Chicken-and-Fresh-Mint Hamper Sandwiches
Delhi Sandwiches
LOCAL FAVORITES
Tea Garden Momos
Thukpa
Chili Oil (Tsu-La-Tsu)
Spiced Chicken Cutlet
TEA SPECIALS
Tea-Marbled Deviled Eggs
Darjeeling Tea Sorbet
PERFECT CUPS OF TEA
DARJEELING TEA
Steeping the perfect cup of Darjeeling tea is simple but exacting.
Bring a kettle of freshly drawn (or bottled) water to a boil. Rinse out a teapot and quickly discard the water. Add 1 level teaspoon—about 1/12 ounce or 2.5 grams—of pure long-leaf Darjeeling tea per cup to the teapot. Pour the water over the leaves, cover the pot, and steep for 3 to 3 ½ minutes, letting the leaves breathe and stretch. Strain into warmed teacups.
Darjeeling’s nuanced flavor is best appreciated without milk, sugar, or, because of its slight natural astringency, lemon. But if it is impossible to drink it straight, increase steeping time to 4 minutes for adding sugar and to 5 minutes for milk.
MASALA CHAI
Indian spiced tea—properly called masala chai—can include any number of spices, though cardamom pods, fresh ginger, cloves, black peppercorns, and a piece of cinnamon stick are the most common. Some also include fennel seeds, poppy seeds, coriander seeds, and even bay leaves.
Makes 4 glasses:
4 cardamom pods
2 cloves
4 whole black peppercorns
1-inch/2.5-cm piece cinnamon stick
2 cups/480 ml whole milk
1-inch/2.5-cm piece fresh ginger, grated or chopped
3 Tbsp sugar, or more to taste
2 Tbsp loose, strong black tea leaves or 2 tea bags
In a mortar, crush the cardamom, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon stick.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the milk and 2 cups/480 ml water, the crushed spices, and the ginger. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, allow the foam to subside. Stir in the sugar and tea and simmer for 3 to 5 minutes, depending on desired strength of tea, stirring from time to time and watching that it does not boil over.