Tea

Tea is one of those things I really feel I should enjoy, but just can't seem to.  After all, I love hot drinks.  I'd likely take a coffee, hot chocolate, [absolutely] chai, or apple cider any time it was offered to me.  But tea?  I just can't get into it.  I have lots of tea in my pantry; I'm fascinated by it, but I never seem to enjoy a cup.

Perhaps it's the bitter taste.  I have a real aversion to bitter tastes.  During my time in Africa, now twelve years ago (can you believe it?), we had to take two kinds of malaria medicine.  The paludrine wasn't too bad, which was a blessing as we took it every day.  The chloroquine, that was another matter entirely.  There was a method to it.  You had to "slam it down."  You hold the chloroquine in one hand and a cup of flavored liquid in the other, preferably kool-aid, as it was sweet but not fizzy to help dissolve the tablet.  Take them both in quick succession, gulping down as much of your drink as you can.  And then it was best followed by a bite or two of food.  The medicine had this wonderful way of spreading a metallic, bitter taste throughout the back of your mouth and coating your tongue.  I have never encountered a flavor quite like it, as if you licked an old iron doorknob and chewed on burnt coffee at once.  So strong, was it, that it flavored your food for the first few bites of your meal.  Eating something after taking the medicine was an immediate need, as I found out to my detriment.  I forced down my chloroquine one morning but then neglected to eat as I should have.  Within minutes (I kid you not), I felt my stomach beginning to sour, to the point I wasn't sure I could have eaten anything.  Not long after that, I just barely made it into the bathroom to vomit every last tasty morsel of the tablet back up.  Think that's graphic enough?  It's not.  No superlative or description can quite grasp the taste, as any of my teammates from the trip could tell you.

This experience, even without experiencing it twice that one foolish morning, was enough to burn me on bitter tastes.  I watch Food Network stars go into raptures on the bitter taste of frisee or escarole or endive, and I no longer want to try the dish.  Salads at restaurants are sometimes an obstacle course for me, because I cannot enjoy bitter greens.  Coffee I can enjoy with milk and sugar because they can mask the bitterness without losing the other indefinable flavors of coffee.  Tea has no capability like this.  It just tastes like milk or sugar, or still like bitter tea.  So even as I sit here and try to sip my Chinese flower herbal tea (as Eliza would beg for hot chocolate), I am again trying to convince myself how much I like it.