Currently browsing category

Books, Page 6

Books

The Traveling Tea Ladies Till Death Do Us Part

Cozy mystery fans sit back and enjoy the fourth installment in The Traveling Tea Ladies Series. Strong women, strong southern friendships and strong tea are steeped in this mystery best described as “Charlie’s Angels Meet Steel Magnolias.” This time the ladies are busy planning Olivia’s ranch-themed wedding to Detective Matt Lincoln. What starts out as a simple affair turns into a lavish over-the-top circus once event planner, Dixie Beauregard, gets involved. With Olivia’s colorful family coming to town, the stress of the wedding, and the usual prenuptial jitters, it’s more than Olivia can take. She’s ready to call the whole thing off and elope, but not before her wedding plans are dashed by the untimely murder of Dixie with all clues pointing towards her mother, Ruby Rivers. It’s up to The Traveling Tea Ladies to solve the crime and clear her name.

Chai: The Experience of Indian Tea

Chai: The Experience of Indian Tea is a journey into the heartlands of tea production, across the length and breadth of India, offering a glimpse into the history and culture of the people who cultivate it, the process of growing, the diversely beautiful landscapes, the rich traditions and the ceremony. This intriguing volume is a visual treat, that traces leaf to cup, covering the entire spectrum of the tea industry through wonderfully descriptive text and stunning photography; put the kettle on, put your feet up and enjoy!

The Japanese Tea Ceremony: Cha-No-Yu (Tuttle Classics)

First published in 1933 as Cha-No-Yu, or The Japanese Tea Ceremony, this classic remains the gold standard for books on the five-centuries-old tea ceremony, which is itself “an epitome of Japanese civilization.”The Japanese Tea Ceremony is a fascinating exploration of one of Japan’s greatest arts and details the importance of the tea ceremony’s history and traditions, its historical tea masters and its physical manifestations.

Tea and Crumpets

Curious armchair travelers, nostalgic food excursionists, and inventive home entertainers will adore this tour of Europe’s legendary tearooms and salons. A delicious culinary and cultural experience as well as a treasure trove of recipes from top-notch destinations, this little gem lets readers in on the rituals of taking tea. Recipes like the Ritz’s cucumber sandwiches, Claridge’s famous raisin and apple scones, or chocolate scones from Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel, as well as color photographs of tasty tea fare and European teahouses, bring the charm of afternoon tea to anyone’s home.

Culinary Tea: More Than 150 Recipes Steeped in Tradition from Around the World

This cutting-edge tome on one of the world’s oldest ingredients and most popular beverages will be an invaluable tool for both home and professional cooks. Gold and Stern offer new ways of looking at tea: the leaves with a history stretching thousands of years is now a secret weapon in the culinary arsenal.Tea in its many forms has been around for thousands of years, and is a burgeoning industry in many countries as the demand for specialty leaves grows. Read all about the picking and drying techniques virtually unchanged for centuries, popular growing regions in the world, and the storied past of trading.Culinary Tea has all this, plus more than 100 recipes using everything from garden-variety black teas to exclusive fresh tea leaves and an in-depth treatment of tea cocktails. The book will include classics, such as the centuries-old Chinese Tea-Smoked Duck and Thousand-Year Old Eggs, as well as recipes the authors have developed and collected, such as Smoked Tea-Brined Capon and Assam Shortbread.

The World Atlas of Coffee: From Beans to Brewing — Coffees Explored, Explained and Enjoyed

A beautiful world guide to the brown bean. Taking the reader on a global tour of coffee-growing countries, The World Atlas of Coffee presents the bean in full-color photographs and concise, informative text. It shows the origins of coffee — where it is grown, the people who grow it; and the cultures in which coffee is a way of life — and the world of consumption — processing, grades, the consumer and the modern culture of coffee. Plants of the genus Coffea are cultivated in more than 70 countries but primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa. For some countries, including Central African Republic, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Honduras, coffee is the number one export and critical to the economy. Organized by continent and then further by country or region, The World Atlas of Coffee presents the brew in color spreads packed with information. They include: The history of coffee generally and regionally The role of colonialism (for example, in Burundi under colonial rule of Belgium, coffee production was best described as coercive. Every peasant farmer had to cultivate at least 50 coffee trees near their home.) Map of growing regions and detail maps Charts explaining differences in growing regions within a country Inset boxes (For example, what is the Potato Defect? Is Cuban coffee legal in the United States?) The politics of coffee and the fair trade, organic and shade grown phenomena Beautiful color photographs taken in the field. Americans consume 400 million cups of coffee per day, equivalent to 146 billion cups of coffee per year, making the United States the leading consumer of coffee in the world. The World Atlas of Coffee is an excellent choice for these coffee lovers.

The Joy of Coffee: The Essential Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying – Revised and Updated

In this revised and updated edition of the most authoritative guide to coffee, Corby Kummer travels the country and the world to give you all the latest information you need to make a great cup at home: • The best beans and how to buy and store them • The grinder that’s essential for great coffee • Incisive reports on brewing and espresso-making equipment and tips on how to get the best from them, with photographs of current models • A complete, up-to-date list of sources for beans, equipment and Fair Trade organizations

A Tea Lover’s Travel Diary: Phoenix Single-Tree Oolong Tea Tie Kuan Yin Oolong Tea (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

Chinese Tea Master Jason C.S. Chen has spent the past 21 years deeply involved in the business of tea. He has visited most of the best known tea gardens in China where authentic and traditional tea is grown. During these trips he has always had his camera at his side. This first book in a series focuses on two famous oolong teas. Phoenix Single Tree was first created 900 years ago from tea plants that only grow on one mountain in Southern China. Tie Kuan Yin is the most popular oolong tea in the world. It was created 400 years ago, and, at one time, the name Tie Kuan Yin (Iron Goddess of Compassion) was synonymous with tea. This book is a photographic exploration of the creation of these two teas from harvest to processing and the first tasting. Foreword by D. Major Cohen; Introduction by James Norwood Pratt.

The True History of Tea

A lively and beautifully illustrated history of one of the world’s favorite beverages and its uses through the ages.World-renowned sinologist Victor H. Mair teams up with journalist Erling Hoh to tell the story of this remarkable beverage and its uses, from ancient times to the present, from East to West. For the first time in a popular history of tea, the Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, and Mongolian annals have been thoroughly consulted and carefully sifted. The resulting narrative takes the reader from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the splendor of the Tang and Song Dynasties, from the tea ceremony politics of medieval Japan to the fabled tea and horse trade of Central Asia and the arrival of the first European vessels in Far Eastern waters. Through the centuries, tea has inspired artists, enhanced religious experience, played a pivotal role in the emergence of world trade, and triggered cataclysmic events that altered the course of humankind. How did green tea become the national beverage of Morocco? And who was the beautiful Emma Hart, immortalized by George Romney in his painting The Tea-maker of Edgware Road? No other drink has touched the daily lives of so many people in so many different ways. The True History of Tea brings these disparate aspects together in an entertaining tale that combines solid scholarship with an eye for the quirky, offbeat paths that tea has strayed upon during its long voyage. It celebrates the common heritage of a beverage we have all come to love, and plays a crucial part in the work of dismantling that obsolete dictum: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. 50 illustrations

Coffee Life in Japan

This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

An instant classic for a new generation of monkey-wrenching food activists. Food in America is cheap and abundant, yet the vast majority of it is diminished in terms of flavor and nutrition, anonymous and mysterious after being shipped thousands of miles and passing through inscrutable supply chains, and controlled by multinational corporations. In our system of globalized food commodities, convenience replaces quality and a connection to the source of our food. Most of us know almost nothing about how our food is grown or produced, where it comes from, and what health value it really has. It is food as pure corporate commodity. We all deserve much better than that. In The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, author Sandor Ellix Katz (Wild Fermentation, Chelsea Green 2003) profiles grassroots activists who are taking on Big Food, creating meaningful alternatives, and challenging the way many Americans think about food. From community-supported local farmers, community gardeners, and seed saving activists, to underground distribution networks of contraband foods and food resources rescued from the waste stream, this book shows how ordinary people can resist the dominant system, revive community-based food production, and take direct responsibility for their own health and nutrition.

Coffee Culture: Local Experiences, Global Connections (Routledge Series for Creative Teaching and Learning in Anthropology)

“The Anthropology of Stuff” is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each “Stuff” title is a short (100 page) “mini text” illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world. From the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands, here is a commodity that ties the world together. This is a great little book that helps students apply anthropological concepts and theories to their everyday lives, learn how historical events and processes have shaped the modern world and the contexts of their lives, and how consumption decisions carry ramifications for our health, the environment, the reproduction of social inequality, and the possibility of supporting equity, sustainability and social justice.

Herbal Tea Gardens: 22 Plans for Your Enjoyment & Well-Being

This tea lover’s gardening bible contains full instructions for growing and brewing tea herbs, plus more than 100 recipes that make use of their healthful qualities. Readers will find complete plans for customized gardens suitable for plots or containers.

Traditional Afternoon Tea

Re-create childhood and fireside teatime with drop scones, raspberry muffins and banana and ginger teabread, or make refreshments to enjoy on a long summer afternoon, such as Roquefort and pear brioche slices and lavender cake. Clear step-by-step instructions and pictures detail each stage of preparation, with a mouth-watering photograph of every recipe. With 100 beautiful photographs and charming illustrations throughout, this is the perfect companion to a much-loved tradition.

Coffee 2015 Deluxe Wall Calendar

Any way you grind it, blend it, or brew it, coffee perks you up and gets you moving.This calendar’s cool coffee art is a great way to enjoy the java without the jitters.

The Ancient Art of Tea: Wisdom From the Ancient Chinese Tea Masters

“It is my hope that this book will encourage others in the West to pick up where the ancients and the author left off and go out and search for sources of sweet water here in North America. … It is time for us to pick up the mantle and spread the word, Tea.”—Dr. Eric Messersmith, Institute for Asian Studies, Florida International UniversityThe health benefits of tea, from green teas to white, oolong and black teas, are well known in our world today. How to create the perfect, healthy cup of tea is a process few people truly understand, making The Ancient Art of Tea a needed guide for tea lovers.Making a perfect cup of tea is a dynamic process that requires the right environment, good spring water, a suitable fire to boil water, skill in steeping tea, and deep understanding of tea connoisseurship.From a variety of ancient tea texts comes a broader perspective and deeper insight into the topics that surround the tea drinking experience. The ancient Chinese held tea and the various types of tea in high regard for its medicinal and rejuvenative properties. They prized the teas that grew high on the mountains, in crags and crevices in the rocks. They believed that tea was best brewed with pure, clean, mountain spring water, and that fire should be from clean and natural sources since properly heated water would define the subtle tastes of the tea. Using the proper utensils enhanced the taste and experience of tea drinking. And they believed that where you had your tea, along with the people with whom you shared the experience, all determine the value of the tea.The Ancient Art of Tea contains vital information to assist tea drinkers in their quest for yet another pot of delicious tea. This book teaches the two fundamental secrets to tea as practiced in ancient China—technique and taste. These exemplify some of the basic concepts of the philosophy of tea, which greatly enhances tea enjoyment. Not only an exhaustive source of tea knowledge, The Ancient Art of Tea is also a very important volume in the study of Chinese tea and is sure to become a classic in itself.

Tea at Fortnum & Mason

A concise yet sumptuous guide presenting everything there is to know about the art of taking tea, from the internationally renowned store in Piccadilly that is synonymous with style, elegance, and English charm Celebrating the long-standing British institution, this beautiful pocket book covers everything from the history of afternoon tea drinking to Fortnum’s relationship with tea. It also presents more than 45 recipes for all types of teatime delight, as well as guiding the reader through the best types of tea to accompany them. Recipes include Cucumber, Cream Cheese and Dill Sandwiches; Macadamia and Stem Ginger Cookies; Madeleines; Almond and Rose Petal Squares; Honey and Lavender Loaf Cake; and Seville Orange and Whisky Marmalade. Beautifully illustrated with charming vintage tea advertisements and glorious recipe photos, this book is a must-have for tea drinkers everywhere. Metric measurements.

The Vintage Tea Party Year

The Vintage Tea Party Year takes you on twelve months of parties, celebrations and teatime treats as well as introducing more games and craft projects for your chosen theme. See the New Year in with vintage style, make Valentine’s Day extra special, give every child their dream tea party, find inspiration for weddings and baby showers, be the talk of the town with your own summer street party and wrap up for winter with a vintage-inspired Christmas. Angel’s inimitable style will take you on a seasonal journey and help you put on the perfect tea party whatever the occasion.

Alice’s Tea Cup: Delectable Recipes for Scones, Cakes, Sandwiches, and More from New York’s Most Whimsical Tea Spot

Restaurateurs Haley Fox and Lauren Fox share more than 80 recipes for scones, cakes, sandwiches, and more from their charming and wildly popular Alice’s Tea Cup restaurants in New York City. In Alice’s Tea Cup, the Fox sisters tickle the taste buds with sweets, baked goods, and savories while divulging the unique tea-making and enjoying philosophy that has made their whimsical Manhattan tea spots favored destinations for locals and tourists alike.

Homegrown Tea: An Illustrated Guide to Planting, Harvesting, and Blending Teas and Tisanes

Homegrown Tea explains how to grow a large variety of plants in your own garden, on a balcony or even on a window sill could become your tea cupboard. It shows you how to grow your tea from seeds, cuttings, or small plants, as well as which parts of the plant are used to make tea. Liversidge lays out when and how to harvest your plants, as well as information on how to prepare the plant, including how to dry it to make tea you can store to last you throughout the year. As a guide to using tea to make you feel better, there are nutritional and medicinal benefits. Finally, there is an illustrated guide to show how to make up fresh and dried teabags and how to serve a delicious homegrown tea. It is sustainable way to look at a beverage, which is steeped in history and tradition.Sample drinks include well-known plants such as rose hips, mint, sage, hibiscus, and lavender, as well as more obscure ones like chicory, angelica, apple geranium, and lemon verbena.

The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide

Whether it’s a delicate green tea or a bracing Assam black, a cup of tea is a complex brew of art and industry, tradition and revolution, East and West. In this sweeping tour through the world of tea, veteran tea traders Mary Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss chronicle tea’s influence across the globe and provide a complete reference for choosing, drinking, and enjoying this beverage.THE STORY OF TEA begins with a journey along the tea trail, from the lush forests of China, where tea cultivation first flourished, to the Buddhist temples of Japan, to the vast tea gardens of India, and beyond. Offering an insider’­s view of all aspects of tea trade, the Heisses examine Camellia sinensis, the tea bush, and show how subtle differences in territory and production contribute to the diversity of color, flavor, and quality in brewed tea. They profile more than thirty essential tea varietals, provide an in depth guide to tasting and brewing, and survey the customs and crafts associated with tea. Sharing the latest research, they discuss tea’s health benefits and developments in organic production and fair trade practices. Finally, they present ten sweet and savory recipes, including Savory Chinese Marbled Eggs and Green Tea Pot de Creme, and resources for purchasing fine tea.Vividly illustrated throughout, THE STORY OF TEA is an engrossing tribute to the illustrious, invigorating, and elusive leaf that has sustained and inspired people for more than two thousand years.

A Social History of Tea – Expanded Edition

British writer and tea historian Jane Pettigrew has joined forces with American tea writer Bruce Richardson to chronicle the colorful story of tea s influence on British and American culture, commerce and community spanning nearly four centuries. These two leading tea professionals have seen first-hand the current tea renaissance sweeping modern culture and have written over two dozen books on the subject of tea. For nearly four centuries, tea has occupied a remarkable position in British and American society. From tea s earliest introduction into London society in the mid-1600s, tea was an exotic commodity, commanding the highest prices while enjoyed only by a fortunate few. Ladies first drank tea at home, while the men enjoyed the beverage alongside coffee and chocolate in coffee houses. As the custom of drinking tea came to dictate the daily schedules of upper class families in London and Philadelphia, international traders scurried to keep up with the demand for sugar, furniture, silver, porcelains and fabrics to fill drawing rooms on both sides of the Atlantic. Profits from the East India Company s monopoly on tea trade with China subsidized Parliament and sparked a revolution in Boston in 1773. In the nineteenth century, tea rooms began to open, enabling respectable women to eat out unaccompanied – a truly liberating experience. Writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll found teatime to be the perfect tool for setting a scene within their novels. And clipper ships were launched to bring tea ever-quicker from China and the new British tea gardens established in India. The twentieth century saw tea drinkers tango their way across the dance floors of fine hotels as fashion designers introduced new tea gowns every season. By the 1920s, a tea room craze spread across America, allowing women to become business owners and entrepreneurs. But the mechanization of tea and teabags nearly drained tea of its romance after World War II. Fortunately, tea made a comeback as a new century began and the world s most-popular beverage is enjoying a much-deserved renaissance as tea bars, tea shops and tea rooms spring up throughout Great Britain and the United States. Tea has reclaimed its reputation as an important ingredient leading to good health and a balanced lifestyle. As tea drinking becomes a ritual for many, tea has returned to its ancient Asian roots as a cup of humanity.

God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee

Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen. In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation’s most heralded coffee business hotshots—Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts, and Stump-town’s Duane Sorenson. With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America—a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist’s pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee—or a great adventure story—you’ll love this unprecedented look up close at the people and passions behind today’s best beans.

For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History

“If ever there was a book to read in the company of a nice cuppa, this is it.” -The Washington Post In the dramatic story of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage ever committed, Sarah Rose recounts the fascinating, unlikely circumstances surrounding a turning point in economic history. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company faced the loss of its monopoly on the fantastically lucrative tea trade with China, forcing it to make the drastic decision of sending Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to steal the crop from deep within China and bring it back to British plantations in India. Fortune’s danger-filled odyssey, magnificently recounted here, reads like adventure fiction, revealing a long-forgotten chapter of the past and the wondrous origins of a seemingly ordinary beverage.