SC - Tea Blocks

[Craig Jones.]

>Uh, try making a cup of one. Taste it. Chances are it will be bitter
>or tasteless if it has become useless. Depending on how it has been
>stored,it _may_ still be good. I still have some black and some green
>tea that my late father-in-law brought over from China over fifty
>years ago, which is still in excellent shape. It is in the form of
>compressed ingots, pressed into little baskets like a small cheese,
>and dried into cakes. To use it I have to break off a hunk, or I can
>process an entire cake (about a pound, which is a lot of tea) by
>steaming it in a basket over boiling water until the cake is soft
>enough to break up, crumbling it, and allowing it to cool (it becomes
>somewhat flexible but still essentially dry, and dries completely,
>quickly, when cool). A final rub between the palms of the hands to
>break up any lumps completes the process...
>
>Adamantius

I actually saw a block of this stuff in an antique store recently.  It
was a very dark green (almost indistinguishable from black) block
around the size of an A4 sheet of paper.  This was divided into 12
seperate blocks and stamped with an intricate pattern of chinese
characters.  It was called Tea money and was used by the chinese (in
the 17th and 18th cent) as a form of currency,  I probably would have
bought the thing except for the fact that they were asking $5000 for
it.  That would be one hell of an expensive cup of Tea!


Drake.

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