The Story of the Tea Strainer

This is a story of how necessity and evolution gave us some of our most prized silver tea wares. It’s the story of how the humble teaspoon evolved into a multipurpose, long-handled straining spoon, which was remodeled to become the tea strainer, which then developed into the infuser basket and subsequently made its predecessor redundant.

As tea grew in popularity in England through the second half of the 17th century, the early equipage included not just teapots and little bowls but small silver spoons to stir sugar into the tea. The tea was stored in tall jars imported from in 1697 as “long or strainer tea-spoones with narrow pointed endes,” had a second important job to do, for, once poured from pot to bowl, the tea sometimes contained one or two floating leaves that had escaped through the teapot spout. The “strainer tea-spoones” proved perfect for scooping up and removing the unwanted particles and hence acquired the name “mote spoons” or “mote skimmers.” Their third use was for the pointy tapering handles to unblock teapot spouts that had become clogged with wet leaves. The spoons, always referred to as tea strainers throughout the 18th century and as mote spoons only in the 19th, were thus part caddy spoon, part tea strainer, and part spout cleaner. But this charming piece of extremely useful tea ware had a very short life and was only made and used from the late 17th century to the 1770s or ’80s, by which time the first caddy spoons and strainers had started to replace it.