Tea or coffee?

“Let’ have a drink” or “Let’s meet for coffee!” are phrases we use every day to set up a meeting. We say them when we want to see someone inde­pen­dently of a craving for caffeine. In Russia, “tea dates” are as frequent, or even more common than coffee dates, with the difference that tea usually means a quiet pastime at someone’s house, while coffee is sipped and chattered over in coffeehouses. Meetings over coffee are quite new to Russia, dating back to 1996 (when the first European-type coffeehouses opened in Moscow), while tea drinking has a long tradition

Early twentieth-centu­ry painter Boris Kustodiev pictured his famous “Mer­chant’s Wife” sipping tea from a saucer with a customary gesture; drinking hot tea by saucerfuls to cool it is no longer done in public, but pinkies continue to point away from the steaming flavourful liquid in private homes. This prac­tice is said to ascend to mer­chants and their wives, who had also perpetuated the trend of chomping down on sugar cubes rather than let­ting them melt in the teacup. If you see well-mannered folks doing this, it must be their roots acting up.

Russians don’t have a fixed time for tea-drinking, unlike the British with their proverbial “Five O’clock”. Tea can be drunk morning, noon, and midnight. In Rus­si­an literary classics, characters drink tea nearly all the time – any writer would be hard pressed to find a better setting for long philosophical conversa­tions. In Chekhov’s story “The Bishop”, the title char­acter’s mother recounts her day; in the meantime, her son, the bishop, counts up every mention of a cup of tea. His calculations show that she averages a cup of tea every 15 minutes.

Tea drinking takes TIME. It is common for a Russian family to gather around the table every night to drink tea for two or three hours. Whether they decide to watch TV or just talk, it has to be done in the kitchen, no matter how small and stuffy it may be. Actually, cramped space is a bonus of sorts: tea parties require cosiness.

Russians’ love for tea made portable water heaters po­pular. Until recently, no one went on a trip without a utensil-sized metal coil: in most sanatoriums and hotels, cafes closed at 9 p.m., and tea addicts were left to brew tea in their hotel rooms. The heaters were dipped in a glass of water and watched very carefully: there was no warning tone when the water reached boiling temperature, hence the risk of the water evapo­rating and the heater exploding. Some heaters were huge, meant for boil­ing 3 litres of water at a time. When the water was brought to a boil, half a pack of loose-leaf tea went into the pot, and the mad tea party went on and on.

Unlike tea, coffee does not call for prolonged rituals or heartfelt conver­sations. In Soviet times, coffee was a gourmet drink. Good coffee was incredibly hard to come by. A few fortunate people had relatives abroad who smuggled in the rare treat. Coffeehouses with “real” cof­fee (to a Russian, “real” coffee is Turkish coffee, made in an ibrik) were for the intellectu­al elite only. One was hidden away in the Central House for Journalists, unavailable to the multitudes – indeed, most people didn’t even know it was there. If drinking tea together was good for socializing with any and all people, coffee brought to­gether carefully selected circles or snobbish Bohemian coffee addicts.

Nowadays, Russians drink coffee as a pretext for a chat or over dis­cus­sions of new job projects. Coffee is for coffee breaks. Coffee drinking is a hurried pastime for busy yuppies, perfectly adjusted to the crazy rhythm of the city. So if you have business matters to discuss, go out for coffee. But if you wan to get to really know some one, a long bout of tea drinking is what you want. Just make sure to schedule the whole day for it.

Yana Melkumova

The Moscow News 15/01/2009