While food writer Helen Saberi is not a resident of Oxford, she knows the city well, having frequently worked alongside the late Alan Davidson during the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, an annual weekend-long conference on food, its culture and its history. This year the symposium takes place at St Catherine’s College from July 8 to 10 and the topic will be Celebration.

Having just published Tea — A Global History, a charming erudite little book in The Edible Series, published by Reaktion Books (£9.99), Helen is confident that the delegates attending this year’s symposium will not only be drinking a nice cup of tea during the breaks between presentations, but including details of tea celebrations in many of the papers they present and discuss.

Helen explained that before writing the book she thought she knew a great deal about the subject, as she drinks a lot of tea and has always enjoyed trying different tastes. But she soon discovered there was an awful lot she didn’t know. She was particularly stuck by the enormous variety of teas and ways of drinking them around the world.

She acknowledges that in an ideal world she would have travelled round the globe sampling various teas along the way. Unfortunately these days, book advances don’t cover such extravagances, so she had to be content with becoming an armchair traveller, relying on conversations with tea experts such as Prof Richard Hosking, who helped a great deal with the chapter on Japanese tea. There was, however, one tea producer based in the UK, which to Helen’s delight is creating such a tasty product she now lists it among her favourites and dares to suggest it should be enjoyed alongside cucumber sandwiches.

“In 1989, the first tea plantation in the United Kingdom was established on the Tregothnan Estate, in Cornwall, where excellent black and green teas for blending are produced, many of which are being exported to the tea-loving Japanese.”

Helen said her favourite Tregothan tea is their Earl Grey blend which is delicately flavoured with a bouquet of Citrus bergamia.

Helen admits that there are many books about tea and the history of tea drinking, so her main aim when putting her book together was to fill it with new information, much of which she discovered when researching the teas of Turkey, Kashmir and Afghanistan.

“Very little has been written about the teas from those countries or the Tea Road, which was the caravan route out of China, established during the 17th century and often called the Great Tea Route. Starting in Northern China, this major trading route travelled northward through the Gobi Desert, west across the taiga of Siberia, to arrive at the cosmopolitan centres of the Russian empire. This journey took more than a year to complete,” Helen added.

While working on the book during the past couple of years or so, Helen has come to appreciate the many different flavours that tea offers. Although she was brought up on strong black tea in Yorkshire, one of her favourites now is an oolong from Taiwan which has a subtle fragrancy and lightness along with a slight peachy, floral flavour.

Helen said that The Rare Tea Company sells an exceptionally good one, the famous Tei Guan Ying, the iron Goddess of Mercy, which tastes superb. She also likes Jasmine pearl tea, again because of its fragrance and lightness. For a slightly stronger taste she goes for China keemun — a lovely rich tea but still with a light scent and delicate aroma. The smoky lapsang souchong is not one of her favourites and, strangely, she is not keen on expensive Darjeelings: “I find the first flush, even second flush too astringent for my taste, whereas the stronger black teas from India and Africa are enjoyable for the right occasion, though they can be bitter and should be drunk with milk — and, dare I say it, sugar. They are certainly good for waking up early in the morning.” Helen also tried the “fashionable” Puerh teas, popular partly because of their purported health properties and as an aid to slimming, but they did not thrill her much. Having drunk hundreds of teas, some of which she loved, and some she will never drink again, Helen feels that as the range of taste, body and flavour in the teas available to us today so is vast, at the end of the day it is down to everyone’s personal taste.

In her introduction to the book she also points out the different ways of drinking tea: the Chinese sip it from tiny cups, the Japanese whisk it. They serve it iced in America and Tibetans add butter, while Russians serve it with lemon, Afghans flavour it with cardamom, mint is added in North Africa, the Indians boil it with condensed milk, while we drink it with milk and sugar and the Australians have been known to boil it up in a Billy can. A celebratory drink indeed . . .