Tea towels
I had to change over my tea towel yesterday - well I do it frequently and I just happened to ponder on why all of my tea towels - except the souvenir ones (that I shall come to shortly) are really all of a piece in design - somewhat like the above selection - the same but all subtly different - and I wondered why. Well there is another type with a white background and some sort of coloured stripe - I'm sure you know what I mean.
So I set out to find out a little bit about tea towels and found a few surprising things, but not the answer to my question - why are the standard tea towels of a similar textile design and where did it originate? So if anyone knows please let me know. Something in my head told me that they had something to do with Indian cotton and Madras cotton at that, and I did find out little things about Madras cotton and its plaid designs but tea towels were not mentioned so I really don't know. This particular design is wonderful it seems to me - so much the same but with such infinite variety. A bit like the patterned lining of all those envelopes with windows that your bills and other official documents come in. Have a look some time. They are all different - but the same - mostly blue.
Anyway back to tea towels or drying up cloths as some people call them. Mind you it seems that probably the one thing you should not do with tea towels is dry your dishes or bench tops - spreading germs and all that. Better to leave the dishes to dry naturally.
They seem to have come into being in the eighteenth century as linen cloths that the ladies of the house used to dry their bone china for their afternoon tea rituals - hence the name tea towels. Not trusting the maids with the task they did it themselves. They were often embroidered, and matched the napkins and other such things used in table settings. And they were made from fine linen which did not have lint that came off on to the china. They were sometimes used as tea cosy kind of wrapping around the tea pots too. I tried very hard to find some pictures of such things but again could not find any. So this post is not a very successful one really.
With the industrial revolution, cotton became the thing and their productions was industrialised. This is sort of why I suspect that the cotton came from India, as I believe this was England's major source of cheap cotton. Better quality came from Egypt and from the American colonies. But you only needed cheap cotton for tea towels. Later in the American depression the poor in America used flour and potato sacks to make them - I think these were made from hemp. They embroidered those too.
Today the everyday version is still usually made from cotton, sometimes a cotton and linen or maybe polyester mix and the more expensive ones from linen. Linen is made from flax - I knew that, but I didn't know that flax is from the linseed plant. So that is one thing I have learnt today. Linen is smoother and I guess less likely to leave fluff but I don't think it is as absorbent or as heat resistant.
The souvenir aspect of tea towels began in the nineteenth century, and became so popular that now you can probably get a tea towel in just about every souvenir shop that exists. We bought two in France in a market somewhere and framed them to hang on the wall - just to remind us of the place. Not a very good picture I know but it shows what you can do. We should have bought the poppy and olive ones as well. For once we bought a souvenir that we partly considered as crass. Normally we don't buy because of that and then regret it when we get home.
As well as the souvenir type there are also the designer type - beautifully designed little works of art in themselves. I suppose they make nice presents. You can never have too many tea towels really. Some have snappy slogans, some are very 'arty', some advertise things. When I bought my expensive induction cook top for example, it came with a tea towel advertising Electrolux. I actually have a little pile of souvenir tea towels - mostly not as pretty as the two above that I use for things like squeezing grated zucchini. They are mostly made from linen as opposed to cotton and are a little tougher.
Chefs are never without a tea towel. It's considered the second most essential thing after the knives. They use them for all sorts of things like holding hot things, wiping their hands, etc. Another food associated thing you can do with them is dry washed lettuce if you haven't got one of those whirly things. Just put your wet lettuce or herbs in the tea towel, pull the ends together and whirl it around your head - and hey presto more or less dry lettuce. There are actually endless things you can do with tea towels.
But I bet you didn't know that Van Gogh painted at least five paintings on tea towels. He painted at such a rate that he often ran out of materials and so used whatever came to hand. Here are three of them - the other two are still lifes of flowers in vases and are in private collections so I couldn't quite work out which ones they were. These three have been authenticated as being painted on tea towels though:
But of course you can buy tea towels with lots of Van Gogh paintings on them too in souvenir shops all over the world.
Tea towels need to be soft, absorbent and non-fluffy. There are probably competitions for what you can do with them - there used to be a restaurant in Brunswick Street that used them as table napkins - a pretty good idea I thought. A sun hat for the beach? I have used one to absorb steam in a kedgeree, and you use them when making steamed puddings. I think a lot of the things they used to be used for have been replaced by gladwrap, aluminium foil and plastic bags. Wrapping things for picnics, I think bread was sometimes wrapped in tea towels in our house.
Tea towels - so everyday but with so many stories to tell no doubt. Sorry I'm rushing this as I have to go out. Might come back to it tomorrow.
EDITOR'S NOTE: And I did - improved it ever so slightly, but not in a big way.
