Herbal Tea

Herbal Tea

HERBAL TEA

1. Documentary proof on plants that does not impart any medicinal properties

Herbal Tea is a beverage that is prepared in the same manner as tea but which contains no actual tea leaves. Instead, these teas are used by steeping the flowers, berries, peels, seeds, leaves, or roots of plants in boiling water. Examples of herbal teas include: lemon, blackberry, peach, peppermint, and apple/cinnamon.

A product made from the heated and fermented leaves of the tea shrub, a plant indigenous to southwestern China and adjacent areas, and the drink made by brewing those leaves.

Tea was consumed and traded in China early in the modern era (perhaps the fourth century c.e.) and was exported to other places in Asia, especially Japan, within a few centuries. Europeans first took notice of tea early in the seventeenth century, as one of a number of herbal medicinal products used in Asia that was seen as having a potential market in Europe. The practice of tea consumption, like tea itself, entered Europe in the course of the seventeenth century by two routes: from China and Persia through Russia into eastern Europe, and by sea around the Cape of Good Hope through the facilities of the Dutch and British East India Companies. The fact that Russian tea customs and tea nomenclature differ from their west European counterparts to this day derives from the duality of tea's original introduction into Europe.

Tea was not a significant commodity in the Asian-European seaborne trade until the second half of the seventeenth century. In the 1650s and 1660s, shortly before a similar phenomenon occurred with respect to coffee, a sudden fashion for tea taking in the context of a health fad appeared in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. The formal reason for consuming tea was to restore balance to the humors of the body and thus to ward off a large array of diseases. For many years, well into the eighteenth century, tea for home use was available mainly from apothecaries. However, almost from the start of its popularity, tea's appeal went beyond its ostensible purpose. Like coffee, it became a staple of a new kind of public establishment, the coffeehouse or teahouse, both of which in fact usually served both beverages, that multiplied rapidly in the cities of western Europe and became a fixture of social life in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the setting of the coffeehouse or teahouse, tea was associated with sober conviviality, with interest in public affairs, and (initially, at least) with an effort to adapt the civilized conventions of China (then still regarded in Europe as admirable) to European uses. Tea also became the central feature of a major ritual of domesticity in the home, the meal that became known in Britain as “tea.” As the practice of taking tea with large amounts of sugar was constructed in the European world (especially in Britain and its colonies), tea also became associated with European notions of pleasure in ...