Cocina mediterranea or Tea

Cocina mediterranea (Cocina tendencias Series)

Author: Ana Perez Martinez

A new concept in cookbooks, this series is designed for those who want to replicate at home the trendy international cuisine they typically enjoy at restaurants. Simple and nutritious recipes put elegant dishes within the reach of the novice cook. Each book in the series contains 50 recipes.


Un concepto nuevo de libros de cocina, diseñada pensando en los que quieren replicar los platos culinarios internacionales que normalmente disfrutan en los restaurantes. Recetas sencillas y saludable para hacer platos elegantes para los principiantes.

See also: Revolution in Eating or The Traditions of Christmas

Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire

Author: Roy Moxham

Tea came late to England—after its arrival in Portugal, Holland, and France—but quickly became a national obsession. Tea gardens and shops sprang up everywhere in seventeenth-century England. Demand soon spread to the colonies, where the heavy taxation on tea led to smuggling on a massive scale and, in the New World, cost England her American empire. Tea drove the British to war with China, to guarantee the supply of pekoe, and it prompted colonists to clear jungles in India, Ceylon, and Africa for huge tea plantations. In time, the cultivation of tea would subject more than one million laborers to wretched working conditions. Hundreds of thousands of them would die for the commodity that for four centuries propelled Britain's economy and epitomized the reach of its empire. With the same colorful detail and narrative skill that pushed The Great Hedge of India to international success, author Roy Moxham, once a tea planter himself, maps the impact of a monumental and imperial British enterprise. In this new volume, he offers a fully fascinating, and frequently shocking tale of England's tea trade—of the lands it claimed, the people it exploited, the profits it garnered, and the cups it filled.

Publishers Weekly

Moxham (The Great Hedge of India) tells the story of how Britain's thirst for tea meshed with its thirst for empire, with devastating repercussions throughout the world. He points out that after tea first came to England from China in the 1700s, it was in great demand but heavily taxed, which led to an increase in smuggling and eventually played a role in England's loss of the American colonies. He then shows that as tea consumption rose, the East India Company paid for Chinese tea with Indian opium, with consequences that resonate in China to the present day. Then, in the mid-1880s, the East India Company began growing tea in India, which culminated in the importation of slave labor from China, Malaya and Bengal. Flogging, low wages, inadequate food, substandard housing and nonexistent medical care contributed to miserable conditions for these workers. Once tea workers started to unionize and nationalism threatened British domination of the tea industry in India, the British turned to Africa. Moxham concludes his provocative book with a description of the year he spent in 1960 as assistant manager on a tea estate in Nyasaland (now Malawi), where the British planters were still arrogantly confident of their racial superiority and fiercely opposed to Nyasaland's growing independence movement. Moxham's searing history of the commodity that has for centuries been so important for England's economy provides plenty of food for thought to go with that next cup of tea. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A penchant for imperial nostalgia serves the author of The Great Hedge of India (2001) well in exploring centuries of the British lust for tea and a far-flung empire of exotic acreage on which to grow it. In 1961, at the twilight of that empire, 21-year-old Moxham took a job helping to manage a tea plantation in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in southeast Africa. His memories of that experience provide an engaging wraparound to the story of how an ancient Chinese beverage besotted a nation poised to rule the world in the mid-17th century. Moxham assigns the role of Pandora to Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, who arrived for her wedding to restored Stuart king Charles II accompanied by a largish chest of tea. The courtly fashion of sipping the leafy brew became an expensive upper-class habit that, as taxes were relaxed, filtered down to the man in the street. Its original retailers, apothecary shops, hawked tea as a medicinal stimulant, but the coffeehouses of Boswell and Johnson knew a runaway fad when they saw one. Because smuggled tea may have accounted for half or more of the total consumed by the British for most of the 18th century, the author points to the sharp rise in sugar imports during that period as a relevant tracking statistic. (But he misses the opportunity to note that some historians view the resulting fixation of George III on his "sugar islands" as the reason that second-rate admirals and generals were posted to quell the American Revolution while the varsity patrolled the Caribbean.) The rapid oxidation of freshly picked tea leaves required factories close to the fields and lots of slaves or dirt-cheap labor. The varied and nefarious ways British planters met thoserequirements all over the tropical world, right down to Moxham's hard-drinking cronies in Malawi, are fascinating. Unflinching annals of commodity-driven colonialism.

Table of Contents:

	List of Illustrations and Maps
	Maps
	A Job in Tea	1
1	Addiction and Taxation; Smuggling and Revolution	9
2	Keeping the Chinese in Order	51
3	Victorian Enterprise - India	86
4	Victorian Enterprise - the '1st class jungley'	127
5	Victorian Enterprise - Ceylon	156
6	New Empires	185
7	A Year in Africa	219
	Types and Grades of Tea	253
	Glossary	256
	Weights and Measures	257
	Select Bibliography	258
	Index	263
	Acknowledgements	272