Cutting Chai on the Platform

The pan has been on since before the first train. Water and milk and a great deal of sugar, ginger grated straight in, the spices bruised in a stone mortar, then the leaf, and the whole thing brought up hard until it climbs the sides of the pan. It gets strained from a height into glasses the size of a shot. In Mumbai a cutting chai is one glass cut in half — half the tea, half the price, and you are back on the platform before the announcement finishes.

The tea break came to India as a marketing campaign. Through the early twentieth century the Indian Tea Association pushed tea breaks into factories, mines and textile mills, and set chaiwalas up along the railway platforms, because few Indians drank tea and British firms were looking for a market at their own door.

The Association wanted it drunk the English way, with a little milk and a little sugar. It disapproved of the vendors adding spices and pouring in more milk and more sugar, because that meant fewer leaves per cup and less tea sold. The chaiwalas did it anyway. Their version is the one that won, and it is what the word chai now means to most of the world. The spices in masala chai are the street's answer to a marketing plan.

The leaf in the pan has a harder history than the pan does. In 1823 Robert Bruce, sent on by Maniram Dewan to the Singpho chief Bessa Gam, watched tea being brewed from a plant growing wild in the Brahmaputra valley — the Singpho had been drinking it all along. The East India Company set up a Tea Committee in 1834, the first Assam tea reached London in 1838 and was auctioned in January 1839, and the gardens ran on indenture. The Workmen's Breach of Contract Act of 1859 made walking away from a contract a crime punishable by flogging and prison. Between May 1863 and May 1866, 84,915 labourers were recruited for Assam; 30,000 of them had died by June 1866. Their descendants, about seven million people, still live and work on the estates.

Assam Estate CTC BOP is the leaf that pan is built around — crush, tear, curl, grainy and dark, made to give everything it has to boiling milk in four minutes. Cardamom Seed, Whole and Ginger Root, Organic are the two spices to start with if you only start with two. Cinnamon, Sticks, Indonesian Korintje, Cloves, Whole and Peppercorns, Black are the rest of the masala, and the pepper is not a mistake. Vanilla Chai, Organic is the shortcut, for a morning with no mortar in it.

Seven products. One pan, and ten minutes you will start budgeting for.