How does plopping a spoonful of butter in your coffee sound? Because that's the latest fad sweeping the realm of First World Problems, where hipsters and health nuts are now lopping Land O'Lakes in their lattes instead the traditional and way-too-mainstream milk, cream or sugar.
The idea is far from novel, however. Tibetans have been putting yak butter in their tea since the 10th century, and nomadic herdsmen are said to drink up to 40 bowls of the stewy brew a day.
"Bulletproof coffee," as the buttery brew is known, is marketed as a substantive breakfast that not only perks you up but provides slow-releasing energy for hours after consumption. Ironically (considering the super bougie-ness of the trend) this is exactly why the habit of tea drinking caught on to begin with in Victorian England.
Until the Industrial Revolution, tea was considered an exclusively upper-class beverage in Great Britain. Lords and ladies would keep the delicate leaes in ornate chests and drink crisp green and white teas out of small, handle-less porcelain tea cups, in the Chinese style.
As transportation became more efficient and taxes decreased, however, tea gradually became more accessible to the lower orders. With the addition of milk and sugar, it not only gave a caffeine boost and sugar rush but also filled you up quickly and got you back to the mill, the factory or the workhouse post-haste. The milky, sugary brew continues to be known as "builder's tea" to this day.
By boiling water for tea, one also made it safer for consumption and prevented mass pandemics from occuring. Whereas medieval England ran on an endless stream of ale and mead, the industrial revolution and the British Empire would be built on caffeinated, sugared-up, robust, upright and (most of the time) sober Britons.
No less than the famously "manorexic" Romantic poet Lord Byron would breakfast every morning on no more than a raw egg cracked into a steaming cuppa, and in 60s Hong Kong, blue-collar workers agreed that if it was good enough for the Byronic Man himself then it was good enough for them too: the dish (if you can call it that) gwan seui daan, essentially just a raw egg emptied into hot water to which one adds sugar, became a staple on cha chaan teng (local diners) menus from the 1950s, although it's understandably no more than a rarified retro throwback nowadays.
Gwan seui daan
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