Re: Yank Homemade Southern Sweet Tea

In article <[email protected]>, vickiebee
<[email protected]>  on Mon, 17 Jun 2024 at 04:58:26 awoke
Nicholas from his slumbers and wrote
>Nicholas D. Richards wrote:
>[..]
>>>> Russian black tea leaves make an excellent cold or hot tea.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> With orange peel, cinnamon, and cloves? Also, don't the Russians
>>> place a sugar cube between the teeth and sip tea through it?
>> 
>> So my Granny did.  I can remember her, on a hot summers day sitting
>> in the shade of her veranda, with her samovar gently steaming away
>> and drinking her tea through a sugar cube held between her few
>> remaining teeth.  Though we were in London it was nostalgia for her.
>> 
>> It is a shame that the samovar was disposed of when she moved North
>> to that there Manchester. It was a proper old fashioned samovar that
>> burned charcoal.
>> 
>
>She sounds like a lady with a story to tell. Was she a great influence
>on you?
>v
>
Born in Yalta although her travel ID documents said Kharkov (as was), a
'former person'.  We always thought she was Russian, at least that was
the common language between her and my mother.  However when they were
still alive I taped my Latvian Jewish Grandfather and her talking  which
my mother would not/could not translate.

Recently my brother asked his Ukrainian sister in law if she could
translate the tape. A look of surprise came across her face when she
told us that my grandparents were not talking in Russian but Ukrainian.
Her surprise was nothing to our surprise.

We had always realized that we knew very little about Granny's
background, including her real family name, but we now realize that we
know even less.

Influence?  I cannot say; my mother would not let us learn Russian and
banned Granny from talking to us in Russian, even though they always
spoke to each other in Russian. ("If you were speaking in Russian, to
me, Daddy would think we were talking about him" Probably true on both
counts.) From when I was aged 11 we lived around the corner from Granny
and saw and spoke to her in broken English practically every day.

My mother did not learn to read and write in Russian until both her
parents were dead and she was retired.  Must have been a strange class,
the other students were learning to speak Russian as well as to learn to
read and write Russian.
-- 
0sterc@tcher - 

"Où sont les neiges d'antan?"