Why Tuesday should be Teasday
Mardi Gras is more than pancakes or a parade – it could be an iconic day for tea, suggests Adeline Teoh.
Lent is a tradition where for the 40 days leading up to Easter, starting with Ash Wednesday, Christians would give up rich foods, in particular meat. The symbolic gesture represents Christ’s 40-day meandering through the desert and the word ‘carnival’ derives from the Latin carnelevamen, or ‘putting away the flesh’, hence the abstention from meat.
The day before Ash Wednesday is known as Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras, French for ‘Fat Tuesday’, and is a day for gorging and celebration before the serious business of fasting begins. Brazil’s carnival is probably the most famous, followed by New Orleans and more recently Sydney’s parade, which was co-opted by the gay and lesbian community more than 40 years ago.
Shrove Tuesday is the domain for fatty foods, in particular anything that uses up eggs, milk and sugar, which is how pancakes came to be associated with the day. Tea not only makes a great pancake accompaniment – try a dark oolong with pancakes and maple syrup* or a brisk Irish breakfast tea with a lemon and sugar pancake – you can also use tea such as matcha or Earl Grey in the pancakes. If you’ve gone the fatty route, tea also makes a great digestif with black tea and pu’er a good way to cut through meatiness.
But pancake-matching is not the primary reason why I think Tuesday should become Teasday. I had a conversation with a tea drinker at the National Multicultural Festival last month who said his colleagues, who regularly drank booze, were trialling two alcohol-free days per week, the ‘T’ days, Tuesdays and Thursdays. As much because of the pun as anything else, instead they had started to drink tea on those days. I’d already considered that a tendency towards temperance might be one way to encourage tea culture.
And then, as Sydney’s Mardi Gras parade dominated the city at the weekend, I remembered something comedian Hannah Gadsby said in her award-winning show Nanette. She spoke about how the telecast of the parade was her first introduction to other same-sex-attracted people:
“My people… flaunting their lifestyle in a parade! … Don’t get me wrong, I love the spectacle, I really do, but I’ve never felt compelled to get amongst it. Do you know, I’m a quiet soul. My favourite sound in the whole world is the sound of a teacup finding its place on a saucer. Oh, it’s very, very difficult to flaunt that lifestyle in a parade.”
That’s when I realised that tea is a quiet beverage, a peaceable beverage, and that the idea of a boisterous celebration of it seems to go against its very nature. As tea people we need to find a way to celebrate it in our own way. It may not be vocal, it may not involve a colourful convoy of floats down the streets of central Sydney, but let’s make Tuesday tea’s day, our Mardi Cha.
* Suggestion by Cheryl Teo via The Tea Curator
(Below: Comedian Hannah Gadsby would rather drink tea than dance in a Mardi Gras parade. Photo credit: Netflix)
