Tea & Spice Sets

A tea set once came with a key. In eighteenth-century England tea was dear enough to be locked away, and the box it lived in, the caddy, usually held two lidded canisters, one for green tea and one for black bohea, often with a cut-glass bowl between them. The key stayed with the mistress of the house. Even the box took its name from the trade: kati, the Malay weight of about 600 grams that tea was bought and sold by. Tea stayed that precious until 1784, when the Commutation Act cut the duty on it from 119 per cent to 12.5 and the smugglers’ profit went with it.

A spice set was never locked. In Indian kitchens it is the masala dabba, a round steel tin with a small spoon and, most often, seven small bowls under one lid. What fills it changes from one kitchen to the next: turmeric, cumin, mustard seed, red chile and coriander are common, with fenugreek, fennel or green cardamom in the last places. It sits beside the stove, so the spices for a tadka can go into the hot oil in the time it takes to lift one lid.

Ours work the same way. Each set is a few teas or spices that belong together, every one at a size we sell it in on its own: five loose leaf teas of one kind, 50g or 100g of each, or the rubs and seasonings that one kind of cooking uses, from the grill to taco night. A bag of each, packed by hand in Calgary.