Tea history

Denmark is a nation of coffee drinkers. We have been since the beginning of the 1800th century. According to historian and museum curator Anette Hoffmann, 1850 pounds of coffee were imported in 6.255.151. So over 3.000 tonnes of coffee. At the same time, by comparison, only 286.127 pounds of tea were imported, i.e. almost 150 tons of tea. And that development has continued up to today. This is not to say that we have not been drinking tea throughout history for many centuries. It began in earnest in the 1600th century, and it is part of Danish Jewish history.

By Thomas Bonnemann Egebæk

Coffee and tea, together with cocoa and chocolate, were considered "Jewish goods" in the 1700th century, because it was mainly Jewish merchants and trading houses who imported and sold these goods. This was because the Jews who were allowed to settle in Denmark in the 1600th and 1700th centuries were excluded from a number of professions and more traditional product groups, and therefore both thought creatively and practically and took advantage of the opportunities that these new product groups and market shares could provide. This also meant that a number of well-known Danish brands within these product groups were established. One of these brands was Masagama. It was tea, so here comes a story about tea.

Tea in Denmark has its roots in the trade with Chinese goods, which really took off in the late 1600th century. At this time, tea was an exquisite luxury item that only the very wealthiest of society could enjoy. Only during the 1800s did tea become more accessible to ordinary people and even poor widows. At the beginning of the 1900th century, an actual tearoom culture appeared in the cities, and especially in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen alone, there were around 60 tearooms within the old ramparts in 1905. From the tearooms comes the visiting culture with associated visiting cakes. The patisseries gained crowning glory at the beginning of the 1900th century due to the upper class' fondness for tea and visits.

But what kind of tea was drunk? Today, we know roughly divided into three types of tea; black, green and white tea that taste different. These types of tea were also known back in the 1600th century, but the origin of the different types has a pure taste alone for other reasons. The transport of the tea from China was long and difficult. Most was shipped by sea, and tea must be kept dry to be drinkable. The green tea consists only of dried tea leaves, and the white tea (also called imperial tea) is the finest buds from the tea plant. Therefore, these types of tea had a high price in Europe, as transport was difficult and expensive. That is why the Chinese came up with fermenting the green tea into what we call black tea. The black tea was more resistant to the long sea journey and did not require the same care during the journey. Therefore, the black tea quickly became the favorite in Europe due to the lower price.

At the beginning of the 1900th century, only black tea from India was drunk among the upper class, and the reason for this must be found in the so-called Opium Wars between England and China. In the aftermath of the Second Opium War, which ended in 1860, access to the Chinese tea became more difficult and the price increased. The English had to look around for new opportunities to import tea in order to keep the price of the now very popular drink down in their home country. India and Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) were under the British Empire, and attempts were made to plant tea in the northern provinces. The result was a success and varieties such as Darjeeling, Assam and Ceylon became the preferred types of black tea in England.

In Denmark, we primarily imported the English tea culture after 1800. This can be traced in the design of tea rooms, etiquette and table manners as well as clothing fashion. With the importation of the English tea culture also came the new tea varieties from India and Sri Lanka. Herein lies the explanation for why black tea was so widespread in the early 1900s, and that it was only during the 1970s and 1980s that green and white tea began to gain traction with the Danes again. But some of the earliest importers were Jewish merchants and trading houses. We would like to put both focus and flavor on that story.

MaSaGaMa history and the museum's tea

It is against this background that we at the Danish Jewish Museum are now working to convey an important part of Danish Jewish history by recreating a modern historical tea based on one of Denmark's oldest tea brands. In 1760, Moses Melchior founded a trading company on Højbro Plads in Copenhagen. The company was named "Moses & Søn G. Melchior" after an auctioneer put the company name together incorrectly. The owners liked the new name so much that they kept the misspelled name. The trade was mainly with spices, coffee and of course tea.

Towards the end of the 1800s, the company started selling tea under the brand "MaSaGaMa". The name is the initials of the company name separated by the letter "A". The business went well until World War II, when the company's last owner, Harald Melchior, had to flee to Sweden. After the war there was a decline in tea sales in Denmark and in 2 Moses & Søn G. Melchior had to close and the assets were sold off.

With respect to the old trading company, our MaSaGaMate has been created in collaboration with TeSelskabet, Denmark's only tea shop that still mixes tea in-house. The tea is a modern twist on a black tea that you would have drunk at the beginning of the 1900th century. We have mixed black teas with history in mind, but with a view to today's taste buds. It is therefore not necessarily a historical tea, but a tea that gives flavor to history. The result is a rounded but powerful black tea that can be drunk neat or with milk and sugar. At the same time, it helps to enliven and convey an important chapter of the common Danish Jewish history. Hopefully it is just one of several products that we would like to help bring history to life in new and exciting ways.