More orange pekoe and pekoe-cut black tea, please!

The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon in living memory wherein two impeccably drawn daimyo sit opposite each other in a teahouse and dunk teabags. "Around here," says one in the best Mr. Moto dialect ever heard in print, "honorable tea ceremony gone way downhill."

“Orange pekoe & pekoe cut black tea...” Lipton's mantra on the side of every box. Lots of name magic, there.

Strange thing, "peckoe" is pronounced "PECK oh," not "PEEK oh." Technically not a kind of tea at all, orange pekoe refers to the size of a tea leaf and its relative position near the tip of a tea twig — ironically, a product never found in teabags for the simple reason that dried pekoe buds can't be stuffed inside a bag that small without breaking them into smaller bits and so getting graded down^† through actual sieves, by size.

And "orange" is also a bit of marketing name magic dissociated from Camellia sinensis which refers to William & Mary's House of Orange, i.e., teas which might almost just conceivably have been shipped on Dutch traders until British gunships and the East India Company cornered the market. So, as Wikipedia so succinctly puts it, to us dumb North Americans, the term means even less than it should, i.e., any generic black tea.

You can buy OP&P cut black teas from Scripture Tea and elsewhere, including (apparently) Walmart. It's nothing special.

^†The stuff in teabags is graded as Fannings — i.e., tea dust. The same size as dirt.

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Iowa Tomato Reminder
Plant May 5 to 10, no later than June 20. Tomatoes need 6 hrs direct sun daily. To avoid plant diseases common to Solonaceae, don't put tomatoes in the same spot as 1, 2 or 3 years ago.

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