Until the late nineteenth century, drinking tea was a very expensive habit and its consumption was largely restricted to the court and the aristocracy, who often used it only for medicinal purposes (like in 1665, when the Tsar Alexey Mikhaylovich got stomach aches, the court doctor, Samoylo Kallins, treated him with tea).
What makes all the difference? Zavarka!A notable feature of Russian tea culture is the two-step brewing process. Firstly, zavarka - the tea concentrate- is prepared: a quantity of dry tea sufficient for several persons is brewed in a small teapot. Then, each person pours some quantity of this concentrate into the cup and mixes it with hot water from samovar; thus, one can make one's tea as strong as one wants, according to one's taste.
What is a Samovar singing about?
The literal translation of Russian tea water heater Samovar is "self-boiler”. Russian people believed that the samovar has a soul. This belief was mainly based on the fact that samovars were producing different sounds when being heated with fuel. The shape of the samovar's body accounts for amazing acoustics and water makes peculiar noises when it is being brought to the boil.
It was common to say that "a samovar is singing". In Russia, the first copper samovar was made in 1778 by the Lisitsyn brothers in Tula, a city known for its metalworkers and arms-makers. There is a Russian idiom coined by Anton Chekhov, describing a foolhardy or pointless action: to take one's own samovar to Tula.
