The Daily: Savoring tea and toast through crisis

May 15, 2020

By Wendy Dorr

Salvation Army workers take a tea break while salvaging furniture from the bombed ruins of homes in Dulwich, England, ca. 1943.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images

When we shared our ode to a buttery, sweet piece of toast, paired with a steaming mug of tea on a recent Friday afternoon, listener responses poured in. Wendy Dorr, who edited the story, on how The Daily team picked this comforting combination, and how to make toast and tea like the experts (though how you’re doing it now is absolutely correct, too):

A couple of weeks ago, during our weekly meeting for “Project Joy and Relief,” we were trying to think of soothing and simple activities that people could do at home. My go-to comfort food is toast with butter and flaky maldon salt (I could eat this all day long!), and I didn’t hold back from sharing this with the team. Inspired, producer Julia Longoria made some calls to food writers at The Times to ask about their favorite comfort snacks.

Lo and behold, Kim Severson’s comfort food was also toast — specifically, cinnamon toast. Kim is a food writer based in Atlanta. She was eager to share her method, which involves toasting a slice of bread, buttering it “to complete abandon,” and coating it with cinnamon and sugar. “One bite of this and I’m exactly back in my mom’s kitchen after school,” she says in the episode.

But as we got to work, I realized that an episode about toast felt incomplete. What goes with toast? Tea, of course.

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My first thought was to call Maggie Smith. I adore her character Violet Crawley, the dowager countess, in “Downton Abbey.” But on such a quick turnaround, it seemed impossible to locate her in time. Then, I remembered a dynamic Brit whom we might have quick access to: Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The Times.

So producer Bianca Giaever gave Mark a call and learned that he has strong opinions about tea and drinks four cups of it a day. Bianca recalled that in their initial conversation, he was “super caffeinated, chipper and really into it.” He explained his process for brewing a strong cup, which involves a stovetop kettle, loose black tea leaves, a strainer and a splash of milk. (And at the end of their call, he memorably told her, “The only drink I’ve ever had with Michael Barbaro is gin, but that’s another story.”)

“Quite honestly, one of the most disheartening things about American life is not the politics, not the incredible social division. It’s the way so many of you make tea,” said Mark Thompson, C.E.O. of The Times.Joshua Bright for The New York Times

After we aired our episode, we heard from many of our listeners.

Some were quick to critique Mark’s process: A listener from Florida said, “Dishwater, gutter water, trough water, that’s what I think when my husband mistakenly adds milk to my tea. Milk insults tea’s rich auburn-chestnut-gold color.”

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Others shared stories of their own ritual with tea and toast. A listener from New Zealand wrote, “I cried along with Kim when she described the feelings her mum’s cinnamon toast brought up. It took me back to my Saturday morning baking marathons with mum to fill the biscuit tins for the week.” And another from Australia recalled, “After years of camping with our children, there was nothing like getting the campfire going again to make boiling hot billy tea.”

The right way to make tea and toast is probably the way you already do it. But in case you want to expand your methods, we’ve published Kim’s and Mark’s recipes, as well as a guide to British tea.

We hope this will get you closer to answering the question posed by Gerry, a listener from England: “What is the right way of making a good old cup? Solve that and you will solve what is the right way of living in this world.”

Talk to Wendy on Twitter: @SchwendyDorr.

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The accidental emperor of the internet

PewDiePie, via YouTube

This Saturday on The Daily, you’ll hear the fifth episode of Rabbit Hole, our narrative series about the internet. Our producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan explains what it was like to investigate the story of the world’s biggest and most polarizing YouTuber:

When I joined The Daily team roughly a year ago, I had no idea that I would wind up spending months of my life buried in the videos of the Swedish gamer and YouTube personality PewDiePie.

A brief history: In 2010, a broke college student in Sweden with a gritty webcam and unkempt hair started posting videos of himself playing video games. Now, PewDiePie is by far the most popular person on YouTube. He has over 100 million subscribers and 25 billion views on his videos. For perspective, The New York Times has six million subscribers.

While watching his videos, I found myself wondering: What is it about PewDiePie? Why and how has he been able to capture so much attention?

It’s an ongoing question, but I did find myself captivated by witnessing a guy move through 10 years of his life. The majority of PewDiePie’s content is him screaming at video games and making odd facial expressions at trending memes (which has its own hypnotic appeal), but you also get to see him drop out of college, move to the U.K., make mistakes, handle them with varying levels of tact, meet a girl online and marry her nine years later. His YouTube page is like a 1,000-hour internet version of the movie “Boyhood.”

For the next two weeks of “Rabbit Hole,” you’ll get to see how PewDiePie’s personality, video content and reputation have evolved in the last decade. We wanted to tell this story — and to explore PewDiePie’s battles with mainstream media — because it’s emblematic of the dominant culture war of our age.

New episodes of Rabbit Hole drop on Thursdays. Look out for them on the Rabbit Hole podcast feed or at nytimes.com/rabbithole. They’ll also be featured as Saturday episodes on The Daily.

On The Daily this week

Monday: Richard Fausset on what we know about the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and why the release of a 36-second video “moved this case from the local stage to a global stage.”

Tuesday: “Initially, he was really kind of out to lunch on it,” Mark Landler says about Boris Johnson’s original approach to the virus. After a series of surprising events, England may be one of the slowest countries to reopen.

Wednesday: This week, the Supreme Court debated by phone whether House committees and prosecutors may obtain records about President Trump’s business affairs. Adam Liptak listened in.

Thursday: The Justice Department dropped its case against President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Mark Mazzetti on the latest reversal in a case full of them.

Friday: When Louisiana’s stay-at-home order expires today, restaurants can begin allowing customers back inside. The decision to reopen lies with restaurant owners, and we talk to one of them.