Tea culture: Difference between revisions

While France is well known for its coffee drinking, afternoon tea has long been a social habit of the upper middle class, famously illustrated, for example, by [[Marcel Proust]]'s novels. Mariage Frères is a famous high-end tea shop from Paris, active since 1854. Nowadays, if the French tea market is still only a fraction of the British one (a consumption of 250 grams per person a year compared to about 2 kilos in the UK), it has doubled from 1995 to 2005 and is still growing steadily. On the other side of The Channel, the consumption is declining. Tea in France is of the black variety, but Asian green teas and fruit-flavoured teas are becoming increasingly popular. French people still favour tea mostly in the afternoon. It is often taken in ''salons de thé''. Most people will add sugar to their tea (65%), then milk (25%), lemon (30%) or nothing (32%) are about equally popular. Tea is generally served with some pastries, including a family of not so sweet ones reserved for tea drinking, like the ''madeleine'' and the ''financier''.