Miss Ford worked on tea blending for two years before she decided upon a ^nixture to which she would give her name. She now has six, in one of which she combines thirteen varieties. Through friends living in india, she established contact with the foremost tea growers of that country. Experiments convinced her that she had a natural gift for tea-tasting. After the fall of Czarist Russia quality teas which had gone exclusively to that country were made available to her. To insure uniformity of her blends, her tea is bought by her agents at the same season, every year.
"Western people," she recalls, "had a decided preference for green tea and Easterners pre-lerred black. Now all this is changed. About seven out of eight homes in America as a whole use black tea, in which category the supreme favourite, Orange Pekoe, falls. Sixty per cent. of tea served in restaurants is black. The green or unfermented tea is still an individual choice out has no great sectional following as it once ad. Forty-two per cent, of the American people drink the beverage clear, 19.2 per cent. use lemon and 38.5 per cent. prefer milk or cream, I have heard it said that there is more tea drinking during times of economic difficulty because of the saving on cream and sugar, without which few coffee drinkers are saustied."
Miss Ford added that good tea can ye spoiled ey bad brewing and that poor tea can be made palatable by proper treatment in the kitchen, "You hear people say that they let their tea stand to get strong so it can be diluted with hot water, but the strength they get is the tannic acid. Properly, all tea should be made in a pot. The pot should be scalded but the tea should not be dropped in before the rapidly boiling water is ready. It should be poured over the leaves and in from three to five minutes they should be taken out. I prefer three minutes, There is no other trick to good tea."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.