Authors: Jeff Koehler
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.
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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.”
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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.
Tibetan Tea with Salt and Butter
BEGINNINGS TO A DARJEELING DAY
The Ritz of London’s Afternoon Tea Scones
Onion Pakoras (Spicy Onion Fritters)
Glenburn’s Chicken-and-Fresh-Mint Hamper Sandwiches
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.
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.
Strain into 4 tea glasses.
Call this version from Chennai—established by the East India Company in 1639 and known as Madras until 1996—masala chai light. Or at least
lighter
. Instead of boiling the spices in the milky liquid, the ginger and cardamom are placed in a droopy cloth strainer and the tea is poured through them. (While the cardamom here is for the flavor, the ginger is largely for health.) You make this at home but also get it on the street, where the strainers are stained and stretched from use.
Makes 2 glasses:
1 Tbsp strong black tea leaves or 1 tea bag
½ cup/120 ml whole milk
2 Tbsp sugar or to taste
2 cardamom pods
½-inch/1.25-cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled
In a saucepan, bring 1½ cups/360 ml water to a boil, add the tea, and boil for 4 minutes. Add the milk, return to a boil, and boil for 1 minute. Stir in the sugar.
Meanwhile, in a mortar, crush the cardamom pods with a pestle. Add the ginger and give it a firm smack. Transfer to a strainer.
Slowly pour the tea through the strainer into 2 tea glasses.
TIBETAN TEA WITH SALT AND BUTTER
“Tea is a favourite beverage, the black sort brought from China in large cakes being that preferred,” wrote Dr. Archibald Campbell, Darjeeling’s first superintendent and the area’s original tea planter, of the Lepchas. “It is prepared by boiling, after which the decoction is churned up in a chunga, with butter and salt; milk is never taken with tea.”
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Visitors to Darjeeling today still find similar salty butter teas—though usually with the addition of milk—prepared by the Tibetan community. In 1959, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, then a teenager, and about 80,000 of his followers fled China over the Himalayas into India after an abortive uprising. Today 150,000 Tibetan refugees live in India, including many in Darjeeling.
This recipe is adapted from Kunga’s, a decades-old-favorite, family-run Tibetan place in the center of Darjeeling just below the Planters’ Club. “Yak’s milk is best,” the owner advises. “But if you don’t have
yak’s milk, then use Amul Gold.” For those that can’t find that popular brand of Indian milk, any other whole milk or even half-and-half works well.
It’s a warm, caloric, and energy-supplying drink, great for cold weather and mountainous climates.
Makes 4 glasses:
2 heaped Tbsp loose black tea or 2 tea bags
½ cup/120 ml whole milk or half-and-half, either cow, goat, or yak
1 heaped Tbsp butter, preferably salted, and ideally from yak milk
Generous pinch salt (more if using unsalted butter)
In a saucepan, bring 3½ cups/800 ml water to a boil, add the tea, remove from the heat, and let steep for 5 minutes. Strain the tea, and discard the leaves.
Transfer to a blender. Add the milk, butter, and salt. Cover the blender tightly and blend for 2 to 3 minutes until frothy.
Return the liquid to the saucepan and bring to a boil. Pour into tea glasses, and serve scalding hot.
The restaurant of the quirky and efficient Cochrane Place Hotel in Kurseong is aptly named Chai Country Café as it sits within minutes of Ambootia, Castleton, and Makaibari estates, with another dozen gardens visible from its terraces. The bar has a resident tea master and mixologist, a young Bengali named Laltu Purkait, who prepares highly original drinks that range from Paan Chai, which recalls
paan
—betel leaf filled with areca nut, lime paste, spices, and all sorts of other ingredients and chewed after a meal—to an even more exotically spiced Tandoori Chai, which uses almonds and rosewater to balance its heady, savory spice blend and offer floral notes to the flickering hints of fire.
This recipe is Laltu’s specialty during the monsoon, when passion fruit are in season. Brilliant, cloudy orange in color, with high tangy notes, a certain sweet freshness, and nonaggressive bite of pepper. Don’t discard the seeds. They are good for digestion, Laltu insists.
Per glass:
1½ tsp Darjeeling or another orthodox long-leaf tea
Pulp of ½ fresh passion fruit, with all juices and seeds, about 1½ Tbsp
1 Tbsp sugar
1 generous pinch freshly ground black pepper
In a stove-top teapot or saucepan, bring 1 cup/240 ml freshly drawn water to a boil. Remove from the heat. Add the tea, cover the teapot, and let infuse for 4 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a tall tea glass, add the passion fruit pulp, juice and seeds, sugar, and black pepper, and whisk well.
Strain the tea into the tea glass. Serve hot.
BEGINNINGS TO A DARJEELING DAY
This classic potato dish, popular across much of India, is a breakfast favorite in Darjeeling. Often including tomatoes and a thicker “gravy,” this version is the kind of quick and simple one found on many tea gardens and takes its inspiration from Prem, the family cook on Goomtee Tea Estate. At the center of the estate is the factory, and up a couple dozen meandering rockery steps through flower gardens, is the red-roofed manager’s bungalow, with its varnished wood floors and walls, airy rooms, and long, enclosed verandah, built by the India-born, British tea pioneer Henry Montgomery Lennox for his family.
Serve the
aloo dum
with hot puri (following recipe) as Prem does.
Serves 4 to 6:
2 pounds/910 g small or medium white potatoes
Salt
6 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1 heaped Tbsp freshly grated fresh ginger
3 Tbsp sunflower or canola oil
1 heaped tsp cumin seeds
2 generous pinches turmeric
½ tsp chili flakes
Finely chopped, fresh cilantro (coriander leaves), for garnishing
Scrub the potatoes but do not peel. Place them in a pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil over high heat. Add a generous pinch of salt, reduce the heat to medium low, partly cover the pot, and gently boil until tender (but not mushy) and the tip of a knife penetrates with little
resistance, 20 to 25 minutes. Drain. Once the potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel and cut into pieces just bigger than bite-size.
Meanwhile, mash the garlic to a paste in a mortar with the ginger.
In a large sauté pan, skillet, or wok, heat the oil over medium heat and add the cumin seeds. When they begin to jump, stir in the garlic-ginger paste. Cook until aromatic, about 30 seconds. Stir in the turmeric and chili flakes, season with salt, and immediately add the potatoes. Add 2 to 3 Tbsp water and turn to coat the potatoes in the sauce well. Reduce the heat to low, loosely cover the pan, and cook for 3 to 5 minutes until hot and cooked through. Garnish with cilantro and serve.
Puri—fried flatbread that puffs up like a bellows—is a favorite companion to
aloo dum
(previous recipe) on Darjeeling gardens, especially for guests or on special occasions. (Chapatis and
parathas
are other daily options.) Puri is also a classic snack combo in the north of the country with a glass of masala chai. Puri never tastes better than when eaten on an Indian railway platform during—or better, after—a long train journey.
Makes about 12 puri:
2 cups/250 g atta flour or an equal blend of whole-wheat flour and all-purpose flour (see note below)
½ tsp salt
1 Tbsp vegetable oil plus more for deep-frying
Put the flour and salt in a mixing bowl and work in the 1 Tbsp of oil. Gradually work in
⅔
cup/150 ml lukewarm water to form a firm dough. On a lightly floured surface, knead until soft, about 10 minutes. Lightly oil, cover, and let rest for 30 minutes.
Roll out the dough with the hands to a thick rope and divide into 12 pieces each about the size of a walnut. Until ready to roll, cover with a damp towel or piece of plastic wrap to keep from drying out.
In a deep skillet or wok, heat 2 inches/5 cm of oil over medium-high heat. The oil is the right temperature when a small piece of dough floats and vigorously bubbles.
One by one, press down the balls of dough and roll out, working in different directions to keep it round, into thin disks about 5 to 6 inches/12.5 to 15 cm in diameter. Carefully pull up the puri and slide
it into the hot oil. Lightly force down with a back of a large, slotted spoon and keep it submerged with gentle taps until it begins to puff up and turn a golden brown, 10 to 15 seconds. Gently turn it over. (Do not turn again.) Fry until deep golden brown, another 10 to 15 seconds. Transfer with the slotted spoon to paper towels to drain. Serve hot.
Note:
Atta flour is stone-ground, semihard wheat flour. It is sometimes sold as
chapati flour
. A good substitute is a one-to-one blend of whole-wheat and all-purpose flours.