The Daily - A Bit of Relief: Tea and Toast

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

In this week’s episode of “A Bit of Relief,” we turn to tea and toast for comfort. First, Kim Severson, a food writer at The Times, shares her love for buttered toast sprinkled in cinnamon and sugar. Then we hear Mark Thompson, C.E.O. at The Times, explain how to brew his ideal cup of British tea: using a stovetop kettle, loose black tea leaves, a strainer and a splash of milk. It's more complicated than you'd think.

Hold on. I got to feel it. Okay, here we go. Hi, this is Kim Severson. Hi. Hi. Hi, this is Kim Severson. Okay. Here we go.

Okay. I just have to focus again. So, I write about food for the New York Times, and I live in Atlanta, and I have a child, and I have a partner, and I have a house. in Atlanta and I have a child and I have a partner and I have a house. I cook 12 or 15 meals a day, it feels like. I do all the dishes and I try to process being in this pandemic, which is crazy. It's a lot in a day. One thing I lose sight of is myself. So if I can, I take 10 minutes slip away to the kitchen and make myself a perfect cup of tea

or a delicious little snack and for me the best thing is to make a perfect piece of cinnamon toast cinnamon toast is something you probably don't think about eating. I don't think about eating, but all we're doing these days is thinking about eating. So I started with some bread, and it doesn't matter if it's like the squishy white bread you grew up with or a special kind of sourdough loaf you made yourself. kind of sourdough loaf you made yourself. I have this piece of kind of dense white, very yeasty, sweet smelling, almost brioche-like bread, which is perfect for cinnamon toast. Goes into the toaster. Now the thing is, you have to toast it so that it's just the right amount of brown, not too light and not too burnt. So you may have to run it through the toaster twice, but what else do you have to do besides babysit your cinnamon toast? It's toasting. We just sit here and wait for it to toast.

toast. Okay. All right. I have a very awkward relationship with my toaster. I can never pick exactly which number it needs to go on, so I'm constantly fidgeting with how long to toast. And it's still toasting. Okay. All right. You know, I grew up with five kids in my family, and we didn't always have a ton of money. Sometimes we had a little more money than others, but my mother always would buy whatever that bread that the supermarket turned out in their bakery. It sort of has the allure of being home-baked. I think she was trying to be slightly aspirational, you know, a little bit more than a loaf of Wonder Bread or Sunbeam or whatever. Okay, so the toast here is not quite how I want it. It's close, but we're going to have to put it in for another shot. Remember when we used to have restaurants, we had like ash things coated in ash and then

charcoal was a, you know, flavor component. I don't like that in my cinnamon toast. So we're getting very close, almost. I think paint dry and watching toast toast are two things that are similar. However, I will say that this smells better than paint drying. Okay, it's toasty. It's just got a little dark around the edges. And also the crust is, you can even hear that. That's a knife against the edge of the crust.

It's actually sturdy enough. And so now comes the butter application. And the thing is, I have to do this while it's warm, because if you wait too long, you're going to ruin the effect. So you have to spread the butter on. As soon as the toast is cool enough where you can hold it with the edge of your finger then you start spreading on the butter you've got to be thick with the butter you want it to get melty and thick this is really no time to worry about your caloric intake or the possible health effects of eating this butter because i think right now the last thing that's going to be a problem for you health-wise is the butter on this toast. So just butter with complete abandon. Okay, and that kind of starts to soak into the bread,

and you want the butter to go all the way to the edge. So then you have to have a perfect mix of cinnamon and sugar. Now, my mom used to have a shaker that had cinnamon sugar in it, so we could just, you know, kind of do it yourself when we came home from school, but I've mixed mine up perfectly, I think. And then, and you want to go a little bit high when you sprinkle. You don't sprinkle too close to the toast so you get a more even coating of the cinnamon. Sorry about that. I had a kitchen towel fail. I had reached over to get the kitchen towel because my fingers were buttery, but we're back. Okay, so now, it seems like a lot of fuss for cinnamon toast. Okay, the thing about the cinnamon toast is that one bite, and I am exactly back in my mom's kitchen after school, and I feel completely safe and happy. And that's really all I'm looking for right now, safe,

happy, and delicious. My mom died a few years ago, and I've really thought about what she'd say about the current situation we find ourselves in. And I find myself talking to her. And so I get to have this little piece of cinnamon toast and have a moment with my mom. I'm going to cry now. I know I'm like crying now. Jesus. It's true though. I've been thinking about her, what she would think about all this, something. you know, I've been thinking about her, what she would think about all this, you know, something. She, you know, grew up and she was a kid of Italian immigrants, grew up on a farm. They didn't have electricity for a while. And I'm sure that she would tell me to count my blessings and just get on with it. So maybe not the coziest thing, but that's pretty much what she would say,

just like, get your shit together. And then the other thing that she would always tell me to do is go find somebody else who has less than you and help them out. So maybe you can go make someone who's feeling badly a piece of toast today. I'm tired. Do I have to like like, send you a check for this therapy, or are we okay? Oh, shit. Okay, I'm done. This is not easy. Okay. The only thing that would make this better is a perfect cup of tea.

And no one is more obsessed about their tea than the Brits. And we have the perfect Brit. Okay, so I think we can go, and this now should all record for posterity. My boss's boss's boss's boss, Mark Thompson. Excellent. Okay, all right, I'm going to stop this. My name is Mark Thompson. I'm the chief executive of the New York Times Company,

and as you can hear, I'm a Brit, or to be more exact half british half irish and what that means is um when we're looking for comfort you know we have great literature we have great music we have all of those things of course but what we turn to more than anything else is a nice cup of tea and so i thought i'd take teach you how to get up. Don't let me. I swear like a trooper. So I'll do the last bit. Hot tea got my country through two world wars. I have to tell you now, this country is at war with Germany.

End of the British Empire. The breakup of the Beatles. Who broke it up? John. John did. The 2008 financial crisis. The World Central Bank's act together to slash interest rates. And yes, even that recent spot of bother with Harry and Meghan. of the Beatles. Who broke it up? John. John did. The 2008 financial crisis. The world's central banks act together to slash interest rates. And yes, even that recent spot of bother with Harry

and Meghan. A deal has been agreed on the future of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. So it should be able to get you through the coronavirus too. The spine of the day in many ways is tea. And it begins in the morning with breakfast tea, which means quite a strong, punchy black tea. We've got a range of teas. We can introduce you to the teas and I'll go through the process, which of course begins with water. So we're just going to add the water to the kettle. It's an obvious point, but I'll make it anyway.

It wants to be fresh water. Don't live with the water you've already got in the kettle. Pour it out. Start from scratch. You want it to be absolutely fresh water. Quite honestly, one of the most disheartening things about American life is not the politics, not the incredible social division. It's the way so many of you make tea. Here's a scenario.

You walk into a fancy hotel or a restaurant and you order a cup of tea. The waiter brings it. And what comes is a glass, which is full of kind of tepid water. And there's this thing, this kind of plastic pyramid, which isn't in the water. It's sitting on the side.

The whole thing's getting cold. The bill's 10 bucks, and they obviously won a nomination for a James Beard Award. So much of our life, and indeed so much of the food we have, is kind of instant. We expect it instantly.

Tea's different. You have to wait for the tea. The tea kind of happens on its time rather than your time. And there's something very pleasing to me about that, about a process. You know, it's not a natural process. It's a rather amazing human invention. The whole idea of curing tea leaves, preserving them, and then bringing them back to life with water is a rather amazing human discovery. We want the water to be at a rolling boil when it hits the tea leaves.

It wants to be really boiling. That's the thing that just jerks the tea back into life and makes it kind of zesty and delicious. Now, I have to say, there's an incredibly lively debate in this house about how much tea you actually put in. The way I was taught by my beloved mother was one teaspoon per person and one for the pot. So if it's two people, small teapot,

you put in three teaspoons. My wife, Jane, thinks that's completely wrong. It's far too strong and makes a kind of stewed, kind of bitter, bitter thing. I shouldn't set myself up as any kind of real tea expert. I'm not. But I did learn at the feet of a real tea expert, bitter thing. I shouldn't set myself up as any kind of real tea expert. I'm not. But I did learn at the feet of a real tea expert, my mother. My mother was the ninth child of an Irish country policeman. They lived in County Donegal. So lots of children, very little money. And what really

kept them going, and this was true of households all over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, of households all over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland was tea. What I've got here in my hand is a British supermarket blend. It's rather beautiful tea, this one. You can't see it, but it's still discernible. I mean, sometimes tea is very, even very good tea. It's very ground. It's very small and very dense. This has got lovely, you can still see the fibres of the leaves. It's got a royal warrant from the Queen, so who knows, maybe Her Majesty the Queen is bent over the stove in Windsor Castle, even now, making this exact same cup of tea for Prince Philip. You can hear the kettle's boiling,

so I'm just going to go and pour the water over the tea leaves now. We're going to get it right onto the tea leaves and I think you can't hear but that's pretty much boiling as it hits the hits the tea my particular way of doing I'm going to turn the gas off and I'm going to give it one stir put the lid on and we're going to just leave that. And we're going to leave that for five minutes. On a more serious note, I've decided to finally bite the bullet and work my way through the Bach cantatas, of which there are 200. I'm reading David Copperfield, which is absolutely fantastic.

I mean, it's a fantastic National theatre production of one man, two governors. It's perhaps not his best novel, but it's so kind of luminous. It's unbelievable, the greatest music ever written, written by one guy. It's a Goldoni comedy, which is one of these, you know, Bildungsroman. It's about a young man from childhood making his way in the world, and I've always loved those books. from childhood making his way in the world and i've always loved those books so the tea's now been sitting for five minutes and we're going to pour it i've got a little rather nice silver tea strainer i'm going to pour it into the cup

um i'm going to put the strainer down. I've got some 2% reduced fat milk. I'm going to add the milk. This is the tea the way my wife likes it. It's not quite as strong as I'd like, but it's got quite a good colour to it. How would I describe the colour? It's very hard to describe. It's probably not, I suppose, in the end, a very nice colour. It's a kind of putty colour with a little bit of orange in it, maybe. It's very good tea. That's very good tea.

It's got a freshness to it. It's light. It's quite flowery. And it's got that briskness, that little kind of sizzle. It's almost like a kind of savoury sensation. It's not, it's not really a taste. And it just speaks of something which is, which is fresh and alive.

And that's the, that's the, that's the miracle of tea. It somehow comes back to blooming life on your tongue. So there's going to be some sips here, followed by some sort of payoff thought. Now, what am I going to say to the crowd? Hang on a second. Excellent. A case of winers turned up

now you're talking I'll do another episode on that right let's get back to this right so I'm just going to okay I'll just

I'll just pour a second cup that's looking good one stir and I'm going to take another cup to my wife Jay who's still in bed. She's reading Toni Morrison, A Song of Solomon,

and I'm going to bring her a cup of tea, a nice cup of tea. So that's a possible ending. Actually, I need to get back to my emails, but tea's going to make those emails go a little bit better. Thank you.