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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Where did the British(?) idea of milk in tea come from? When I lived in Britain I was surprised to see that people put milk in tea almost without asking as if “tea” meant “tea with milk”. When they had colonies with tea plantations I assume it’s not common in Asia so when Britain had colonies people didn’t drink tea with milk there when the Britons arrived? Is it like UK Indian cuisine, an “adaptation” to the local taste?

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"Asia" is sometimes perhaps too broad of a category for different cultures it contains. Milks don't work for East/Far East Asia teas such as Chinese or China-derived Japanese tea, but teas from Southern/Central/Western Asia such as Indian, Mongolian, Tibetan or other nomadic cultures are either best with milk or use specific fermented milks or butters as parts of preparations.

Despite its sometimes bad reputation, Nepalese and Tibetan butter is really tasty. And quite nutritious, more resembling some kind of broth / soup.

Where did the idea of tea with only a spoon of milk came from? I am from Pakistan working in Britain and I absolutely despise the British tea. Kadak Chai in McDonald's Qatar is the closest to the tea I have bought outside my country.

Tea is our social drink and made by boiling nearly same amount of water and milk with loose tea. It's never fruit flavored, just tea.

So I take it in (at least) Pakistan there was a culture of having milk in tea before the British colonial era?

I dont know the history of tea in subcontinent. We have one more form of Tea called Doodh Patti (Milk Tea) where tea is added directly in milk, no added water.

The book referenced on Wikipedia is on Library Genesis [1], and I found it so interesting I'm not sure which bits to quote.

> At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Indians did not know how to make a cup of tea and were reluctant to drink one. Now that India is both the world’s major producer and consumer of tea, this seems incredible. It confounds the myth that the British acquired their love of tea from their Indian subjects. In fact, it was the British who introduced tea to the Indians. Although they barely changed the way Indians eat, the British radically altered what they eat and drink. While the introduction of a wide variety of European and American vegetables to India was an inadvertent by-product of British rule, the conversion of the population to tea drinking was the result of what must have been the first major marketing campaign in India. The British-owned Indian Tea Association set itself the task of first creating a new habit among the Indian population, and then spreading it across the entire subcontinent.

[1] http://library.lol/main/5677300D17F8B79988D323EDE13C2FA2 (Start at book p187, which is p208 in the PDF.)

Reference 11 on this might have some information. It looks like a trade group in India promoted less milk, in order to sell more tea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_chai

(And hopefully someone from Pakistan can recommend somewhere in Britain with good chai.)

1 cup water, 1 cup milk, 3 teaspoon tea, 3 teaspoon sugar. Boil for few minutes to dissolve the color and taste into tea.

Taste depends a lot on tea itself. I have used Lipton Yellow Label (loose tea, available on Amazon) most of my life. Process differs a bit for tea bags.

I have yet to find a place of Pakistani tea here in UK.

Better than how they consistently fail to read water lines on rice cookers[1]

1: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/cursed-bbc-food-rice-v...

It came from the 17th and 18th centuries where the china cups weren't quite as strong. The heat of the water would often crack the cups, milk was used to cool the tea and stop the cups breaking.

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